The conventional wisdom would hold that Clarence Norman, the chairman of the Kings County Democrats, fared quite well on Election Night earlier this week. The defeat of Mayor Bloomberg’s referendum question means that party primaries will continue to be the way candidates for office are chosen. Manipulating the outcome of party primaries is Mr. Norman’s specialty and forms the base of his power.

Mr. Norman can take further heart from the fact that, as usual, all of his choices for Brooklyn Supreme Court were elected, while a rival slate of insurgent candidates put forward by the Working Families Party failed to attract enough votes to elevate even one justice to the bench.

But Mr. Norman may not be popping the champagne corks after the next judicial campaign. Two rival political parties — Working Families on the left and Republicans on the right— made an unprecedented attempt to challenge the Democratic Party’s dominance of the elected judiciary this season and made enough of a showing that future candidates will surely consider straying from Mr. Norman’s Democratic line.

The competing judicial slates put forward by the GOP and WFP offered respectable, independent candidates, but suffered from a case of bad timing: The parties hastily recruited candidates for the bench only when an ongoing investigation into judicial corruption heated up and led to Mr. Norman’s indictment. Now political reformers of all stripes are in a position to start to strategize and stage a more focused assault on the citadel of Democratic power in Brooklyn by forming a single, coordinated slate early in the season, and then taking the slate to the voters with a clear call for change.