Two days later, and I’m still trying to get my head around the Scott Brown victory.

People in politics tend to get conditioned to see the world in certain ways. For example, the campaign that is insisting “the only poll that matters is the one on election day” is toast, because that phrase means they can’t find any good news for them in any poll – e.g., “we’re only down by four percent among independents,” etc. We become conditioned to see the political landscape as a pretty intractable balance, or imbalance, of power: Red states tend to elect Republicans, blue states tend to elect Democrats. Incumbents are hard to knock off. Demographics change a bit here or there, but most years, the battlefield of competitive races doesn’t look too different from two years ago (in the House), or four years ago (in the Electoral College), or six years ago (in the last similar round of Senate races).

When our perceptions of the political world have been shaken up in recent years, it’s generally been bad news for conservatives. In 2006, I remember sitting in the NRANews studio on Election Night, as my friend Marshall Manson, going through his thick binder of notes, noted Nancy Boyda’s surprise upset of Rep. Jim Ryun, and said (if I recall correctly), “The Republicans just lost the 42nd most at-risk seat on my list.” The last two cycles brought plenty of rude awakenings to the GOP. You easily could have thought there was no way a Democratic presidential candidate would carry Indiana, North Carolina, or Florida, or any of Nebraska’s electoral votes. You would have thought there was no way a Democrat would win Senate races in North Carolina, Alaska, or Montana, or pick up House seats in places like Alabama, or eastern Colorado, Idaho, and the Virginia Beach area.

So as Republicans contemplated their miserable situation at the dawn of 2009, the road back looked long and difficult. First they would win back the how-did-we-lose-that-seat races; then they would get back to the light-red districts, and then, probably four years or six years down the road, they might start winning in swing districts again.

And now that conventional wisdom is wrong.

As great a story as Joseph Cao is, even his upset win in 2008 pales in comparison to what Scott Brown just achieved in Massachusetts. Cao had an under-the-radar race against a guy who was caught with cash in his freezer; the Louisana Republican just had to spotlight his own decency and persuade Democrats that William Jefferson wasn’t worth the effort to defend.

Scott Brown didn’t just eke out a victory by a hair in a special election. He beat everything the Democrats and their allied groups could throw at him. Folks in Massachusetts said they couldn’t stand to watch television or listen to the radio, as the airwaves were a nonstop cavalcade of attack ads. In addition to all the spending support, Martha Coakley had Bill Clinton drop his Haiti aid work to come in; Obama flew in for a nationally televised rally and was recording robo-calls. Brown had, what, Rudy Giuliani for a day?

The only close race that has gone well for Democrats lately was Bill Owens’s win in the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district. What did Bill Owens do different from Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, and Martha Coakley? Well, at first glance he didn’t make as many glaringly obvious mistakes – no stumbling over his positions, no awkward answers to good questions, no suggestions he was hopelessly out of touch with the district.

Right now it appears that the overreach by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have created an environment where Democrats aren’t quite destined to lose, but where they simply can’t make any mistakes. In many parts of the country, the electorate is looking for an excuse to throw a Democrat incumbent out.

I spoke to a GOP official watching the party’s 2010 outlook closely. “Look at the kind of universe we’re in,” he said. “Look at the Cook Report, and how many of their most competitive seats are ones that are R-plus [Republican-leaning?]. The question is, ‘Is the environment good enough where we start fighting on their turf?’ Can we look more seriously at D-plus districts – maybe against a Joe Courtney in Connecticut, a Chellie Pingree up in Maine, an Adam Smith in Washington state, a John Barrow in Georgia – districts that are marginally Democrat historically? Do they get more competitive now that we’re in a different environment?”

If Massachusetts is competitive, obviously then districts in places like Connecticut, Maine, and Washington state have at least the potential to be competitive. And with a Republican governor in New Jersey, a Republican Senator in Massachusetts, and Larry Sabato projecting Republican wins in Senate races in places like Delaware and Illinois, we’re in a completely different political world than we were in 2008.

Blue isn’t so blue any more, and the purple’s looking pretty red these days.