A truly historic night: I can say with complete assurance that they were the first off-year elections ever held since I began blogging at NPR.

Ok, so maybe that wasn't the message you were looking for. But was there a message that came out of yesterday's results? I'm not sure if there was, though that hasn't kept people from telling us what it meant.

Here are some observations.

(But first, I hope you got to participate in, or at least check out, our live blogging last night. We took questions about every race imaginable, from 7 pm until about 11:20 pm — a very successful effort, I thought, one that will be duplicated in the primaries and elections to follow. And we have further analysis in our "It's All Politics" podcast (up later today) and the regular Wednesday edition of the Political Junkie segment on Talk of the Nation.)

First, with two Democratic-held gubernatorial races up for grabs and both going to the Republicans, it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't a big night for the GOP. It was. Focusing on whether it represented a "defeat" for President Obama — as Republicans say it was and Democrats say it wasn't — misses the point completely. You know that if there was a Republican in the White House and two Republican governorships were lost to the Democrats, the arguments would be reversed.

But it is a defeat for the Democratic Party. They were on a roll in Virginia, having won two successive gubernatorial contests and replacing two GOP senators with Democrats in the past two elections. Obama captured the state last year, the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. You're not going to tell me that a GOP sweep of all three races in the Old Dominion — governor, lt. gov. and atty general — doesn't send a message about which way Virginia is heading. At least not in 2009. Yes, Creigh Deeds may not have been a great candidate (and, conversely, Bob McDonnell ran a very disciplined and effective race). But coming out of last June's primary, Democrats were insisting that Deeds was exactly the kind of Democrat who could keep the party's winning streak alive. And he obviously was not.

Democrats also complained that McDonnell is really a right-wing ideologue masquerading as a moderate. What that really meant was that they were frustrated in their inability to lay a glove on him. The fact that independent voters — so crucial to the Obama victory last year — went overwhelmingly for the Republican says volumes about what really happened last night.

The results in Virginia were not a surprise, but they were in New Jersey. True, Gov. Jon Corzine (D) was deeply unpopular for most of his four years in office, as his promises to improve the state's economic conditions failed to materialize. True, Corzine trailed his GOP opponent, former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, by double digits for much of the year. But when the polls tightened in October, making the race a dead heat, there was a sense that the momentum was swinging Corzine's way. And yet, in the end, that wasn't the case. And, like Virginia, independents went overwhelmingly for Christie, despite the well-financed effort by Corzine to tear him apart in TV ads.

It's the first time since 1993 that Republicans took both governorships away from the Democrats.

But whatever GOPtimism Republicans felt in winning the pair was tempered by the loss of the historically Republican congressional seat in upstate New York. The move by Obama, whether he knew it or not, to pluck Rep. John McHugh (R) out of his House seat and make him his secretary of the army was a brilliant move. It forced the GOP to spend heavily on a seat that they haven't lost since the 1800s, and it exposed ideological fault lines that could jeopardize other Republican seats — think Florida Senate, 2010, with the primary involving establishment favorite Charlie Crist, the outgoing governor, and conservative hero Marco Rubio. Of the 29 congressional districts in New York, the GOP now holds two — the fewest in history.

Another surprise came in the race for mayor of New York City. The fact that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was re-elected was never in doubt. But for someone who pumped in an estimated $100 million of his own fortune in what was perceived to be a routine effort against City Comptroller William Thompson, and then to come away with an unimpressive 51 percent victory was a shocker. Pollsters, who had Bloomberg up by some 15 points or so, never saw the building voter resentment over how Bloomberg overturned term limits to suit his third-term needs.

Much more on the 2009 races in today's Talk of the Nation.

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