8 a.m. ET: When reporters look for patterns worthy of coverage, they usually follow a rule -- three makes a trend.

Three or more similar examples are enough to merit a story. So what exactly does it mean that Republicans won governor's races Tuesday in two states that backed President Obama in 2008? Does two make a trend in this case? And what about the race in New York's 23rd district that supposedly heralded the rise of conservatives but instead just became a Democratic pickup? The morning-after analysis shows little consensus on the answers to those questions. The results surely matter, but no one can say yet quite how much.

The GOP wins in New Jersey and Virginia, Adam Nagourney writes, "put the party in a stronger position to turn back the political wave President Obama unleashed last year, setting the stage for Republicans to raise money, recruit candidates and ride the excitement of an energized base as the party heads into next year’s midterm elections." Dan Balz cautions that "off-year elections can be notoriously unreliable as predictors of the future," but the results still "delivered clear warnings for the Democrats." Howard Fineman surmises that "the deep skepticism that the (shrunken) electorate showed toward Democratic candidates can't be interpreted in any other way than as a vote of not-quite-confidence in the man in the White House."

Everyone agrees which issues drove the races -- "Voters in all three states expressed concern about jobs and the economy, and some expressed unease over Democratic policies," the Wall Street Journal writes. ABC News observes, "Voters who expressed the highest levels of economic discontent heavily favored the Republican candidates in both" New Jersey and Virginia, but "[m]ost in both states ... said the president was not a factor in their vote."

Some Democrats tied themselves in knots trying to explain the results. The Democratic National Committee issued a statement noting on one hand that New Jersey and Virginia both have a recent history of handing the governor's mansion to the party not in control of the White House. "It would have been historic if not unprecedented to win one or both of
these races given historical trends," the DNC writes. On the other hand, the party's statement says "[t]hese races turned on local and state issues and circumstances and on the candidates in each race." Well which is it? Powerful "historical trends" related to control of the White House, or local issues and candidates? And Republicans are certainly eager to say that Virginia and New Jersey have implications far beyond those two states. Press releases in The Rundown's inbox this morning claim that the gubernatorial results were a setback for both climate change legislation and the Employee Free Choice Act. Were they really? Will Robert McDonnell and Chris Christie be voting on those measures?

The headline result was the New Jersey governor's race, both because the state has been genuinely blue in recent cycles and because the contest was so much in doubt right to the end. The final polls had showed the race between Christie and Jon Corzine to be a dead heat, but "in the end, independent voters swung heavily toward Christie, making the former U.S. attorney the first GOPer to win a statewide race in Jersey in a dozen years," the New York Daily News reports. Statistically, the key number was 6 percent -- the portion of the vote won by independent candiate Chris Daggett, a number low enough that it may have proved fatal to Corzine. "Daggett did well in debates and came close to convincing voters that he could win, but crumbled in the final two weeks of the race," the Philadelphia Inquirer writes. Tom Moran says the result was "a pointed personal loss for Corzine" who "was awkward in his public appearances, stumbling in his speech and distant from legislators in his own party." Newsweek points out that "Christie is not an orthodox conservative," so the lesson about New Jersey may be different from that of Virginia.

McDonnell led a Republican sweep in the Old Dominion, "emphatically halting a decade of Democratic advances in the critical swing state," the Washington Post writes. "Exit polls by the AP showed that independents, who narrowly backed Obama in Virginia last year, voted 2-to-1 for McDonnell," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. "In addition, exit polls showed Democrats had trouble getting their base to the polls. Yesterday’s Virginia electorate included more voters who supported Republican John McCain in 2008 than Obama." Did McDonnell win because he's a traditional conservative, or because he downplayed that he was and focused instead on retail politics and economic issues? Watch for each side of the internal Republican debate to draw different lessons from his victory.

Speaking of that GOP split, the civil war within the party between moderates and conservatives appears to have handed New York's 23rd district to the Democrats. The New York Times calls Bill Owens' win over Doug Hoffman "a setback for national conservatives who heavily promoted a third candidate in what became an intense debate over the direction of the Republican Party." Putting it mildly, the Associated Press writes that "the race took several sharp curves leading up to Election Day," with the end result being that a district that's been represented by the GOP for more than a century is now in the blue column. Might Hoffman have won easily if the race had just been between him and Owens all along? Or was Hoffman simply too conservative for the district, regardless of Dede Scozzafava's role? The Fix notes that Democrats have now won five straight competitive special elections, "A very impressive record in tough-to-figure-out specials."

Also of note, Michael Bloomberg won reelection by just a five-point margin, a much narrower spread than anyone expected. The New York Times writes that "voters angry over his maneuver to undo the city’s term limits law and his extravagant campaign spending provided an unexpected lift to his vastly underfinanced challenger," Bill Thompson. John Garamendi won the day's other House special election in California. Maine voters repealed a law that would have allowed gay marriage in the state, a somewhat surprising result given the polling there. "I think we have to seriously consider whether there is some sort of a Bradley Effect in the polling on gay rights issues," Nate Silver writes, meaning that respondents might tell pollsters they are pro-gay rights when they're really opposed. Washington state appears to have approved a law expanding domestic partnerships.