DEMOCRATS, weeping over their breakfast of cornflakes and arsenic, can console themselves today: At least Robert Ehrlich's victory shows, against much previous evidence to the contrary, that there really is a two-party political system in Maryland.

Republicans, doing cartwheels across the state, can rejoice in this fact: Any party can win a gubernatorial race at least once every 35 years or so.

Several weeks back, when polls were showing Ehrlich edging ahead in the race for governor, and momentum was clearly building, I reached him at home one morning.

"It looks pretty good, doesn't it?" I said.

"Are you kidding?" he laughed. "An overconfident Maryland Republican is an oxymoron."

But he knew.

He knew, the same way everybody knew, going back to the earliest days of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's ascension as the Democratic candidate. It was in the wind, it was in the bones, it was in the whispers among people who once reflexively voted Democrat and now found it easy to mock Townsend's syntax, or her hair, or wondered why she was digging in her heels on slots.

It was there when Martin O'Malley, mulling a run of his own, fumed over the free ride Townsend was getting. It was there when Dutch Ruppersberger, still thinking about his own possible run for governor, fumed over fellow Democrats who were telling him to forget it, that Kathleen had too much money, and he should think, instead, about a run for Congress.

It was there in the old Democratic strongholds, in places where the east-side organizations would gather, and everybody would talk about Senate races and House races, and then they'd trot out William Donald Schaefer to lead cheers, and when the evening was over you realized nobody in the hall had mentioned Townsend's name and half of Schaefer's people were talking like Republicans.

A week ago, when everybody publicly said the race was too close to call, I had lunch with nine political insiders, all Democrats, all accustomed to watching the party muscle out the vote on Election Day. We polled the table: Who was going to win, and by how much? Everybody at the table said the same thing. It was Ehrlich; it was over.

Maybe it was the swagger. Ehrlich walked into a room like a guy confident he could take hostages; Townsend looked like the plucky girl at her first high school hop, who didn't expect anybody to ask her to dance, so she'd stick out her chin and introduce herself and hope for the best.

The whole campaign felt like a reversion to high school: the captain of the football team running against the awkward girl from the chess club.

It was in the air.

Everybody mentions the 15-point drop Townsend suffered in the polls. But the 15-point spread was there before Ehrlich had officially committed to run. He had 35 percent, even when nobody outside the Baltimore metro area knew his name. Townsend was stuck on 50 percent -- even when she had no serious opposition.

It's not that Townsend's a bad person; actually, she's an extraordinarily nice person, who's thoughtful, serious, empathetic, and wants earnestly to carry on her father's political legacy. But she seemed to edge away from that legacy as much as embrace it.

She picked a converted Republican as her running mate. At first blush, it seemed a stroke of genius. The guy, retired Adm. Charles R. Larson, was everything she was not: an authoritative, military male, a guy who automatically kept Ehrlich from branding the Democrats a bunch of liberals.

But it implied what everybody knew: The Democrats were running from their own identity. They were trying to be all things to all people, to keep the radio talk-show guys who live in the back pocket of the Republican Party from nipping too ferociously at their heels.

There was something else in the wind: It was time for a change. Ehrlich called it a culture of corruption in Annapolis, which was unfair shorthand. Nobody's ever breathed about Townsend and corruption. But there's a political smugness in Annapolis, characterized by Gov. Parris Glendening's attempt to redraw voting lines for Democratic candidates' benefit. The lines were so convoluted, and the effort so nakedly partisan, that the state's highest court tossed them out and redrew them.

People noticed. They didn't like Glendening before that -- his popularity ratings are as low as any governor's in the country -- and they certainly didn't like him after that. And Ehrlich made the connection. His political ads kept referring to the Glendening-Townsend years. And Townsend never made the break with the man who'd gotten her this far.

Which, of course, was the initial problem: all those voters who thought she'd gotten a pass, who said she'd never have gotten this far without her maiden name and Glendening's embrace of it (and the money it connected to).

You could hear that kind of talk across the entire campaign. It was in the wind. Ehrlich, standing in the right place, got swept up by it.