For certain blue-staters, last week’s news arrived like a thunderbolt. It seemed years since their side had won anything. Pundits had written their obituary many times over. “They don’t have a strategy,” they would write. “They don’t have a game plan.”

They were told to give up, to drop out of the competition and acknowledge that they would never have what it takes to compete for the hearts and minds of Americans. Heck, they weren’t even shown respect in their own state, and polls showed fellow supporters wavering, ready to change sides.

The other side had come to seem always bigger, stronger, better organized. They represented people in the Deep South, and the far West, people who embodied the power shift from the industrial Northeast to the Sunbelt. And they represented money: the kinds of donations, in a tight competition, that can make the difference between victory and defeat. Couple that with their dominance of the airwaves — of television and talk radio — and the other side seemed unbeatable.

But then things began to change. Perhaps the other side had grown too powerful, and power had bred over-confidence. Perhaps they had underestimated their opponents, who in the meantime were quietly building a winning team and successful strategy. Fat and rich, the perennial winners were ripe for a fall, for payback, for a changing of the guard. One by one they expected easy victories, and one by one the perennial losers were coming up winners.

Still, those who stayed up late last week weren’t sure that it had all been a dream, and in the morning they turned to the newspaper to snap them back to reality. And yet, there it was, in glorious black and white, the kind of headline they thought they would never read again in their lifetime: