On a hot and lonely day at the polls, Del. Bobby Orrock beat the only Republican primary challenger he's ever faced.

With 55 percent of the vote, he defeated Spotsylvania County Republican Chairman Shaun Kenney in a House of Delegates primary that drew only 7 percent of the 54th District's voters to the polls.

Orrock wasn't elated with the results, admitting to his supporters that he hadn't won by the margin he'd wanted.

Kenney won in seven precincts --all in Spotsylvania--of the 21 precincts in the district, which includes central Spotsylvania and the Woodford area of Caroline County.

He told his crowd of about 30, gathered at the Massaponax Howard Johnson, that the showing was respectable.

"That is not a defeat, guys," he said. "We shocked the world tonight--against incredible odds."

But there was no question that the race reflected the wishes of a very few. Only 3,635 of the 51,516 registered voters in the district cast ballots.

Just how low the turnout would be was evident early in the day. Some poll workers reported opening the doors to find only one or two people waiting to vote on their way to work.

Orrock, a 49-year-old agriculture teacher at Spotsylvania High School, said that when he left the school after giving a morning exam, he was a little nervous knowing that so few people were voting.

"In low turnout elections, a small pocket of people can make a big difference," he said.

Orrock spent the afternoon sweating in the 98-degree sun outside Smith Station Elementary School, the largest precinct in the 54th District. He easily won that precinct.

By the time he got to Lee's Hill Restaurant in Massaponax to greet supporters after the polls closed at 7 p.m., it was hard to tell whether it was nervousness or sunburn that had turned his face bright red.

As campaign staffers called in from registrars' offices in Caroline and Spotsylvania counties, Orrock bent anxiously over a spiral notebook where his friend Dave Rose was recording results until it became clear that there weren't enough votes outstanding for Kenney to pull ahead.

At that point, Orrock's brothers Johnny and Tom each grabbed a leg and hoisted him up, something they've done in every one of their little brother's House of Delegates races when victory becomes evident.

A few minutes later, just after 8:20 p.m., the cell phone rang again. This time it was Kenney, who had gathered with his own supporters at the Massaponax Howard Johnson. He had just learned the election results, and was calling to concede.

Now the coast was clear for Orrock to talk about the win.

He worried that only 3,635 people voted in the Republican primary, versus the more than 20,000 Spotsylvania Republicans that turned out last November to vote for President George Bush.

"If all 20,000 had come out, who knows what the results might have been," he said.

The results probably weren't purely Republican voters, though.

At the Smith Station precinct in Spotsylvania, poll chief Sharon Deane said a few people had admitted they usually voted Democratic, but had picked up Republican ballots because they wanted to vote for Orrock.

"One said, 'God forgive me,'" for voting for a Republican," Deane said.

Kenney ran a campaign in which he maintained he was the real conservative in the race, as the absolutely pro-life, anti-tax candidate. Orrock, a 16-year incumbent, outspent the Kenney campaign five to one.

While Orrock emphasized that he saw voters walking to the polls with fliers from the Kenney campaign that distorted his record, Kenney steadfastly denied any suggestion that he ran a negative campaign.

"Bobby used the double negative quite well," he said. "Whenever an opponent brings up a voting record, the incumbent will accuse the opposition of mudslinging."

He also denied that Orrock's victory was confirmation that residents of the 54th district are willing to pay higher taxes to maintain government services. Orrock voted for the controversial $1.4 billion state tax increase in the 2004 General Assembly session.

Orrock even said he got a few complaints from voters at the polls about that vote, even those that were going in to vote for him.

But he told his supporters that while the Kenney campaign used that vote to paint him as a tax-raising liberal, he saw the vote as the responsible thing to do to end a session that had gone way past its deadline.

Kenney, a 27-year-old analyst at JRM Technologies, a firm affiliated with Russ Moulton, who helped fund and manage Kenney's campaign, hinted that this might not be his final attempt at unseating Orrock.

"In two years, if we don't get the voting record that we believe reflects the values of the 54th district," he said, "we will be here again."

To reach EMILY BATTLE:540/374-5413ebattle@freelancestar.com