Too few data points.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Partisans of every stripe are reading cosmic significance into Tuesday's off-off-year elections, in which Republicans were elected as the governors of Virginia and New Jersey and a Democrat won a New York House seat that had been in GOP hands since the Civil War. Republicans interpret their triumphs as presaging a return from the political wilderness in 2010. Democrats see the New York result as evidence of the GOP's self-destructive tendencies.

It's all spin. There's not enough data in Tuesday's results to chart the future of either party or the Obama administration. Republicans won both governor's races because they had better candidates - or less kindly, the Democrats had worse ones.

Jon Corzine, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, saw his approval ratings slip into negative territory last year, and they never recovered. Corzine, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, ran at a time when Wall Street moguls' pictures can be found on dartboards. Republican Chris Christie, for his part, is a former U.S. attorney who ran as a moderate, even including President Obama's image in a campaign ad. New Jersey proved nothing except that an unpopular incumbent always is vulnerable.

In Virginia, R. Creigh Deeds turned out to be a colorless candidate after winning a three-way race for the Democratic nomination. Tuesday's result could have been predicted: Deeds also lost to Republican Robert McDonnell in a 2005 race for attorney general. That race gave McDonnell greater statewide visibility than Deeds enjoyed as a state senator.

Virginia was a swing state even before Obama won there last year. Either party can win, with the result depending more on the candidate than the party.

The wildest show was in New York's upstate House District 23, where a special election filled a vacancy created when Obama named Republican Rep. John McHugh as secretary of the Army. District GOP leaders, guided by the National Republican Committee, chose Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozz afava as their nominee. The coronation was interrupted when Douglas Hoffman entered the race on the Conservative Party ticket, claiming Scozz afava had too liberal a voting record to deserve conservatives' votes.

The national party establishment, personified by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, supported Scozzafava, pleading for party unity. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, at the head of an army of radio talk show hosts and conservative officeholders, threw her weight behind Hoffman. After the Club for Growth, a small-government group in Washington, D.C., poured $1 million into Hoffman's campaign, Scozzafava withdrew and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens. Owens beat Hoffman by 4 percentage points.

Democrats relish such evidence of Republican disarray, and see GOP conservatives' rejection of Scozzafava as proof that moderates - to say nothing of liberals - are no longer welcome in the party. Conservatives are cheering a populist shift in the party, away from national leaders and toward the grass roots. Both trends are under way, as shown by Wednesday's announcement by Texas Sen. John Cornyn that the National Republican Senatorial Committee would not provide financial support to candidates in contested GOP primaries - a move that will favor conservative insurgents running against party insiders or incumbents.

But anyone who attempts to forecast the 2010 midterm elections, much less the presidential election of 2012, on the basis of Tuesday's results is engaging in guesswork. There weren't enough races Tuesday to establish a pattern - and even if a pattern were visible, plenty can happen in the course of a year to disrupt it. The next election cycle will have its own unforeseeable personalities and circumstances.