The good news is that the voting for the Coolest Small Town in America has helped put Astoria on the national map.

The not-so-good news is that Astoria placed second, with the margin of victory for Lewisburg, W.Va. of 11,273 votes.

Voting ended at 10 a.m. today on the New York-based Budget Travel website at www.budgettravel.com

Lewisburg’s final tally stood at 138,988 with Astoria garnering 127,715 votes. The third-place community, Clayton, N.Y., trailed with 25,334.

North Coast supporters savored the coast-to-coast publicity, but not the win.

“Astoria is certainly getting some of the spotlight through this contest and generating awareness of our region just by being a contender,” said Regina Wilkie, marketing manager at the Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce. “Mission accomplished!”

The 20 communities from around the nation selected as finalists in the travel agency magazine’s contest were winnowed down from 80 nominations. The only other Northwest community in the top-20 was Port Townsend, Wash., a waterfront town with many similarities to Astoria. It has polled 4,978 votes.

The promotional campaigns to get out the vote in both leading communities ramped up in the last couple of weeks once it became clear that it was going to become a two-horse race. Even “Goonies” star Corey Feldman posted a plea for support of Astoria, where the movie was filmed 26 years ago, on his website www.coreyfeldman.net

Lewisburg had a boisterous town meeting in its central square to rally support and enlisted the help of West Virginia’s U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, who extolled its virtues in a YouTube video, calling on every resident in his state to support the town’s campaign.

The Herald-Dispatch newspaper of nearby Huntingdon, W.Va., fueled the fire by publishing a column by Josh Baldwin, a Lewisburg city councilman and editor of the Greenbrier Valley Quarterly.

Baldwin praised Lewisburg’s “small-town treasures,” including its annual chocolate festival, and accused Astoria “marketing folks”?of enlisting support from “the vast populations of Seattle and Portland to help bring recognition to their part of the country. It’s West Virginia Pride vs. Oregon Pride.

“It is imperative that we reach out to our fellow West Virginians and win this thing,” he wrote.

Astoria Mayor Willis Van Dusen, the community’s foremost promoter for the past several decades, battled back with a proclamation of “Astoria Appreciation Week” Feb. 1 though Feb. 11 and a video available on The Daily Astorian and Budget Travel websites. Eric Paulson, president of Lektro Inc., and leader of the Astoria Regatta Association, and Cyndi Mudge, from Astoria Sunday Market, helped spearhead the campaign for votes. Paulson and Mudge both said it was important for Astoria to strive to win because 2011 is its Bicentennial year.

A “get-out-the-vote”?party, with a plethora of laptops and smartphones, was held at the Street 14 Coffee in Astoria Thursday. Despite this last-minute push, the margin between the two leading towns’ votes increased rather than narrowed overnight.

Skip Hauke, executive director of the chamber, said the buzz from the contest is “economic development in its purest form.” He learned from contacting the community in Minnesota that won last year that the increased nationwide awareness was priceless. “You cannot buy this kind of publicity,” he said.

At one point about a week ago, the margin of difference closed to 3,700 as Astoria supporters used publicity in The Daily Astorian, Facebook, mass e-mails and other means to get the word out for residents to vote.

For Wilkie at the chamber, the positives outweigh any disappointment at coming second.

“We have put up a strong fight for the title and had a lot of fun getting to know Astoria supporters from all over the world while voting,” she said. “And seeing the community rally behind a project is always uplifting.”