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Corrected at 10:40 a.m. on Nov. 6.

Did we really learn much from the off-year elections? I don't think so.

We already knew that Democrats had big troubles. We knew that for the past five consecutive elections, the party that had won the White House just a year earlier lost the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia -- and that the pattern had a good chance of continuing this year. We knew that the young and minority voters who had never cast a ballot before they did for Barack Obama last year were very unlikely to show up at the polls this year or next.

And we already knew that the love affair independents had with Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008 was over. Independents haven't turned against President Obama. They've just stepped back, become more skeptical, and to some extent begun turning on Democrats as a party.

We knew all of this before the first vote was counted on Tuesday night.

Likewise, we already knew that New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, a brilliant former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, was never warm and fuzzy and never really connected with Garden State voters. The Democrat's job-approval ratings had not been above 40 percent, give or take a couple of points, since Moby Dick was a guppy. The incumbent lost even though the anti-Corzine vote was divided between GOP nominee Chris Christie and a publicly financed independent candidate, Chris Daggett, who had once served under Gov. Tom Kean, arguably the most popular Republican governor in New Jersey history. But it's hard to extrapolate much from Corzine's loss that would be significant beyond the borders of New Jersey.

And we already knew that the special congressional election in New York's 23rd District was a strange race, perhaps the most bizarre one I have seen in 37 years of watching politics closely. It's doubtful that any of us will ever see anything quite like it again. Despite what New York state law says, county party chairs should never be allowed to pick nominees. What were they thinking in tapping state Sen. Dede Scozzafava? I can't name another Republican elected official anywhere in the country who supports abortion rights, gay marriage, "card check," and the Obama stimulus package.

Choosing a relatively moderate, pro-labor Republican -- one not unlike John McHugh, who represented the district until Obama appointed him secretary of the Army -- would have made sense. But Scozzafava was not just one bridge too far for the district's voters; she was several.

Many Republican leaders are secretly glad the Conservative Party nominee, Doug Hoffman, lost. A Hoffman victory would have triggered an ideological purge within the Republican Party that could definitely have gotten in the way of big GOP gains next year. As Mark Shields, one of the nation's most insightful political observers, is fond of asking, "Do you want to be in a church that's chasing out heretics, or do you want to be in a church that's trying to bring in converts?" The latter is a surer road to victory.

Democrats are to be congratulated on their triumph in the 23rd District's tough, hard-fought contest. But they would be wise not to forget that half of the votes went to the candidates on the Conservative and Republican ballot lines.

The one really instructive contest on Tuesday was Virginia's gubernatorial race. While the rage in Washington is to blame Democratic nominee Creigh Deeds and his campaign, Deeds might well have been able to defeat the 2005 or 2001 Republican gubernatorial nominees if either had been on the ballot this year.

Yes, the Virginia independents who had been swinging toward Democrats in recent years swung this time instead toward Republican Bob McDonnell. But McDonnell, not Deeds, was the key variable in this contest. In McDonnell, Republicans nominated an attractive candidate who was able to run an effective campaign. The lesson for Republicans to learn from the outcome in Virginia is that they can win with a staunchly conservative candidate in a purple state if that conservative projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image and, thus, doesn't scare off swing voters.

The reasonable image that McDonnell projected by, for example, running a green jobs ad paid off for him when he was attacked for the rather extreme views expressed in his master's thesis. Because those views seemed at odds with his image, attacks based on them tended to roll off like water on a duck's back. Against a more hard-charging, take-no-prisoners style of conservative, those master's thesis attacks could have been killers with independents.

We already knew Democrats had problems. Tuesday just confirmed it.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Kean endorsed Daggett. Kean endorsed Christie.