Actually, O’Donnell didn’t get the word directly; it came through reports in the press.  When a reporter asked her whether she had gotten a call from Sen. John Cornyn, who runs the NRSC, O’Donnell diplomatically answered that she didn’t have her cell phone with her.

The knowledge that the Republican party that didn’t support her in the primary campaign still won’t support her in the general election was perhaps what gave O’Donnell’s victory speech a slightly weary, almost wistful tone.  For a woman who came out of nowhere to knock off a state political legend, she was fairly subdued, possibly because she knows what lies ahead.

“A lot of people have already said that we can’t win the general election,” O’Donnell told the crowd.  After a brief moment of boos, somebody yelled out YES WE CAN!  It caught everyone’s ear.  O’Donnell broke into a smile and then the crowd took it up.

    YES WE CAN!

    YES WE CAN!

    YES WE CAN!

“They’re the same so-called experts who said we had no chance of winning the primary,” O’Donnell continued.  “It will be hard work, but we can win, and if those same people who fought against me work just as hard for me, we will win.”  She didn’t say it, but everybody knew: If that’s what it will take, then she has a very hard road ahead.

The crowd waited a long time between O’Donnell’s being declared the winner and her victory speech.  It apparently took a while for the Castle campaign to get in touch — so long that one O’Donnell aide actually took the stage and gave out a phone number for Castle to call. Still, it was a fairly early evening. Votes are counted fast in Delaware, in part because there aren’t many of them.  Most accounts will say O’Donnell beat Castle 53 percent to 47 percent, but the raw vote totals behind those percentages were pretty small: 30,561 for O’Donnell to 27,021 for Castle.  And that was a bigger turnout than predicted.

O’Donnell had been feeling victory all day.  “I’m afraid to be optimistic, but based on the response — wow,” she said Tuesday afternoon during a stop at a polling place in the small town of Bridgeville.  She could sense a defeat coming for the Republican political establishment, whose mindset she described as “the obnoxious sense of entitlement — the lords of the backroom.”

If O’Donnell’s supporters, all 30,561 of them, were saying anything, it was that they want to send the lords of the backroom a message.  “I think it’s time we showed the Delaware GOP that people with voting records like Castle’s need to be out of Congress,” said retired businessman Ed Heath a few moments after casting his vote in Bridgeville.  “I think they’ve lost their way.”

One odd aspect of the election was that, because Castle had been Delaware’s governor and later congressman for so many years, most O’Donnell voters had voted for him in the past.  “Many times,” said Larry Hollis, a southern Delaware native.  They explained that by saying Castle used to be their only choice, and now they had a chance to pick someone new.  But there was something else going on this time around, and that is the wave of Tea Party frustration with status-quo Washington fixtures like Castle.  In Delaware Tuesday, it was intense, but not always precisely informed.  Most O’Donnell voters seemed to know that Castle had voted in favor of TARP and cap-and-trade, which is true, but others thought he also voted for the stimulus and Obamacare, which is not true.  It didn’t really matter; they were just ready for a change.

The Republicans in Bridgeville who supported Castle mentioned O’Donnell’s well-publicized financial problems: her unpaid taxes, unpaid college tuition, and unpaid house payments.  “She needs to learn how to balance her own checkbook before she takes on ours,” said Judi Moore, who added that O’Donnell is “just a little too far right for me.”  Bring up the financial issue with O’Donnell voters, and they shrugged and said everybody makes mistakes.  “I think you can dig up skeletons on everybody,” said Ed Health’s wife Carla.  “To me, they were a non-issue.”

By Tuesday night, when the crowd gathered for the O’Donnell party at the Dover Elks Lodge, the last thing anybody wanted to hear was anything about their candidate’s money woes.  That was doubly true after the votes started to come in.  And yet the discussion of O’Donnell’s flaws was exactly what they got when former top Bush White House aide Karl Rove appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, displayed on a big screen near the stage.

O’Donnell’s win was “inexplicable,” Rove said.  “There are serious questions about how did she make her living, why did she mislead voters about her college education, how come it took her nearly two decades to pay her college bills, and why did she sue a well-known and well-thought-of conservative think tank,” Rove added.  “This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.”

It would be the understatement of the year to call those comments unpopular at the Elks Lodge.  If Chris Coons, O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent, had walked into the room, people probably would have booed.  If Karl Rove had walked in, they would have killed him.

Still, O’Donnell’s problems are real and aren’t going away. In a late-night, post-victory conversation with party officials in Washington, one said: “The biggest hit we have on Coons is that as New Castle County executive he raised taxes three times.  How is that a viable attack on a candidate when you didn’t pay your own taxes?”  In the final days of the campaign, the Castle camp was pretty rough on O’Donnell.  Now, it’s hard to see them defending her when Democrats take up the attack.

In the end, though, focusing only on O’Donnell’s problems, as the Washington establishment is doing, misses the spirit that was unmistakable all around Delaware on Tuesday.  For a large group of conservatives, watching Christine O’Donnell come out of nowhere — actually, lifting her up on their shoulders out of nowhere — has been a huge boost after the frustrations of the final years of the Bush administration and the first years of the Obama administration.  Those conservatives feel enormously empowered by what they have accomplished, and they are important to the Republican party’s fortunes this November and beyond. The lords of the backroom have got to find a better way of dealing with them than simply dumping on their candidate.