For those many New Yorkers who cannot remember a time when anyone but the GOP controlled the Senate, it is a strange prospect, indeed.

Last week, in a special election to fill the vacated 48th Senate District seat previously held by a Republican, Democratic Assemblyman Darrel Aubertine defeated Republican Assemblyman Will Barclay, 27,901 to 25,345.

The Democratic victory came against the demographic odds presented by the most Republican of districts, hard by Lake Ontario. Republicans hold a preponderant voter enrollment margin of 78,454 to 46,824, with about 35,000 other voters also in play.

Normally, that sort of enrollment advantage means a seat is decided by the Republican nomination, but, in this election, Democratic voters turned out, while Republicans stayed home.

THE RESULTS testify to the increasing strength of the Democratic Party in even the most far-flung reaches of Upstate.

The victory throws Republican control of the Senate after the November elections into increasing doubt.

The GOP has controlled the Senate since 1939, with the single exception of 1965, long enough ago to rule that experience out of the living memory of well over half of all New Yorkers. Only in 1974 were all three political branches - Senate, Assembly and governor's office - held by a single party.

It means that, for more than two generations, New York government has been all about divided government. A partisan split among the three political branches not only has been institutionalized in the operation of state government, but it also has been the very prism through which every political issue has been viewed.

Put another way, most political solutions to state ills have been half measures, cobbled together to split the difference along partisan lines.

What we've gotten out of this has been a state government of extraordinary cynicism, avarice and, most infamously, dysfunction. It's a broken system that doesn't work and that no one seems interested or capable of reforming.

Now, however, voters Upstate, where Republican senators still cling to seats in gerrymandered districts, are going to be asked to look into the abyss in the November election, when every single member of the Legislature will up for election.

After that election, it will be either more of the same split governance or - horror of horrors - a new day in which a single party, the Democrats, are in charge.

Melodrama aside, there is some basis for trepidation.

Can the interests of what is simplified as "Upstate" be fairly represented by a state Democratic Party so heavily weighted toward the metropolitan New York City area?

Gov. Spitzer is a New York City product, his Gallatin country residence notwithstanding. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is a Manhattanite. And Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith, who may or may not become majority leader if his party seizes the Senate, hails from Queens.

So, we are told, the Senate GOP now will pull out all of the stops to convince Upstaters of the horrors that will be visited upon their land should New York City Democrats take control.

Change can be scary, but, with even just a sliver of promise, it sure as hell beats a rotten status quo. At least there will be no question about who to blame when things go wrong.