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No matter what happens after this, Creigh Deeds' victory will go down as a textbook example of what can happen in a three-way race when the two front-runners beat each other senseless, and the third guy becomes the consensus alternative.

It wasn't too long ago that I met a prominent Democrat on Jefferson Street in downtown Roanoke; he was shaking his head in despair that Deeds had decided to run for governor instead of trying again for attorney general. He thought Deeds was a sure loser.

And he was -- for awhile. When this was a two-man race -- Brian Moran vs. Creigh Deeds, most pundits assumed Moran would win for the simple reason that Northern Virginia would defeat rural Virginia anyway. Then Terry McAuliffe jumped into the race. That completely threw Moran off his game, it seemed. From that point on, McAuliffe was the story and, well, my sense is The Macker just imploded.

He would have been a very different kind of candidate. Where Virginia Democrats were accustomed to nominating a conciliatory Mark Warner or Tim Kaine type, McAuliffe was all about hype and flash and, well, confrontation, if need be. My sense is a lot of Democrats realized that just wasn't a winning formula in Virginia. (Historical note: McAuliffe was very much aligned with Bill Clinton; and let's remember that Obama smoked Hillary Clinton in the Virginia primary a year ago.)

It's sort of like the old line about how picking a candidate is like picking a spouse: McAuliffe was a hot date for awhile but not a long-term relationship. He might yell at the neighbors and embarrass you in front of your relatives. Deeds might not be flashy, but he'll make sure the the trash gets taken out and the kids get to soccer practice on time.

The turning point for Deeds was when he got the Washington Post endorsement. I don't know whether newspaper endorsements matter much in a general election, but in a primary, well, clearly a lot of Democrats in Northern Virginia paid attention to the Post. That gave Deeds -- from tiny Bath County -- pretty powerful street cred in the suburbs.

From that point on, Deeds moved up up up in the polls. Over the past few days, we saw not only a flurry of polls showing his momentum, but we also saw many Democratic pols come out to support him. That was a give-away there: Politicians like to be on the winning side.

Still, the breadth and depth of Deeds' victory is pretty amazing, especially considering where he was coming from in the polls (someplace south of zero, it seemed):

Consider:

* Deeds won almost everywhere. If you colored in a map of Virginia, whatever color you assigned to Deeds, that's what color the map would be. The only places he didn't carry were some localities in eastern Virginia, often with large African-American populations. McAuliffe won Amelia County, Greensville County, James City County, and Emporia. Moran won Charles City County, Dinwiddie County and Petersburg. But Deeds wasn't far out of the money, and he won places such as Norfolk and Richmond.

McAuliffe also picked up two stray localities in far Southwest Virginia -- Norton and Wise County. And Moran won his home city, Alexandria.

Let's look at it another way:

* Deeds won 10 the state's 11 congressional districts. The only district he didn't win was the Third District, the predominantly black district that stretches from Richmond to Norfolk. McAuliffe took that, by a slim margin.

* Deeds won by impressive numbers in Northern Virginia -- especially considering he's from rural Bath County, and the other two guys were from NoVa itself. But Deeds absolutely smoked 'em in rural Virginia. He took 64 percent of the vote in the Fifth District in Southside Virginia, 68 percent of the Ninth District in Southwest Virginia and 72 percent in the Sixth District, which runs from Roanoke up into the Shenandoah Valley.

* Despite the big margins, voter turnout was pretty light in Southwest Virginia. I spotted one precinct -- the wonderfully-named Frying Pan Precinct in Dickenson County -- which recorded only five voters. Deeds won 'em all.

* You don't see numbers like this very often: Deeds took 97 percent of the vote in Alleghany County, 97 percent in Covington and 97 percent in Highland County. Compared to those numbers, he took "only" 96 percent of the vote in his home county of Bath.

-- Dwayne Yancey, senior editor