The state Republican Party got its man: Bucks County Commissioner Jim Cawley won the GOP lieutenant governor nomination Tuesday night, pulling away from the nine-candidate field after all the precincts reported.

Cawley won 26 percent of the vote, or 209,000 votes. Longtime Lancaster County GOP official Chet Beiler came in second with 20.6 percent support, 164,000 votes, while Butler County state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe finished third at 12.7 percent, 101,000 votes. The only other candidate to crack 10 percent, York County businessman Steve Jonhnson, came in at 10.5 percent, 85,000 votes.

The race was marked by its uncertainty — the state-party endorsed Cawley was seen as only a slight favorite because of the number of candidates — and its negative tone toward the commissioner. Candidates from Beiler to Metcalfe wasted little time going after Cawley, panting him as the tax-raising hand-maiden of GOP leaders and not a true conservative.

His victory appears to be attributed mostly to winning by large margins in three of the four voter-rich Philadelphia “collar counties”: Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware. Cawley won his home county with 70 percent support, roughly 24,000 votes more than Beiler, his closest competitor. He won Montgomery and Delaware counties with more than half the vote.

His victory might produce a sigh of relief for Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Corbett, the Allegheny County attorney general whose ticket now has geographical balance with the southeast Cawley. The second and third place finishers, Beiler and Metcalfe, would each beset Corbett with their share of problems.

Beiler was charged by attorney general agents nearly a decade ago in connection with an election code violation, while the controversial Metcalfe could have scared away moderate southeast Republicans.