Somewhere, Steve Minarik is smiling.

Despite Robutrad, despite the scandals in the Greece Police Department, despite the older scandals of the selection of the public defender and the MCC president, Monroe County Republicans waltzed away with all of the prizes yesterday.

All of them.

Democrats won the city races, of course, but the Republicans barely put in an appearance there. Out in the suburbs, where the Dems needed to pick up only one seat to take control of the County Legislature, and where they had some strong candidates in several races, Republicans made a clean sweep. They hung onto all of their seats in the Lej, and thus their one-vote margin of control. They grabbed control of two suburban towns from the Democrats -Irondequoit (where there are more registered Dems than Republicans) and Mendon.

And in race after race, the Dems didn't even come close.

What happened? And what, if anything, does this mean?

Some preliminary thoughts:

• If the few voters who turned out yesterday are representative, the divide between the city and its suburbs has sharpened.
• Monroe Democrats have been gaining voter-registration strength, but the often-overlooked "blanks" - voters who aren't registered with any party - liked the Republicans in this election.
• If the Dems couldn't pick up a single seat in the County Legislature in this environment, how relevant will the party be in the suburbs in the future? What do they need? A new message? A new leader? Rebuilding from the ground up?
• Are jobs and taxes really the only issues that matter to Monroe County residents?
• How much of this Republican sweep is due to voter disgust with the Democratic-run state government?
• How much of it is due to suburban voter disenchantment (or worse) with Barack Obama? Is it oversimplifying to note that Republicans throughout New York State's suburbs had a good day yesterday - as they did in Virginia and New Jersey, where voters embraced Obama in last year's presidential election?
• Voter turnout yesterday was abysmally low - around 32 percent - which may or may not have had anything to do with the results. Is that because everybody (except the folks in Irondequoit and Mendon) is satisfied? Because nobody cared about any of the races? Because voters are fed up with politics and think it doesn't matter who's in charge? (Local leaders sometimes seem to go out of their way to prove the point. City officials talk about having to cut expenses to the bone and then consider hiring the mayor's former campaign manager as fire marshal.)
• In the past, County Legislature Republicans have paid little attention to their Democratic colleagues. They'll have no incentive to do so now, and that does not bode well for city residents.