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The way we cover and consume political news is about as rational as stock-market investors looking to find the next Bernie Madoff.

Four years ago -- a year after one of the closest presidential elections in history -- there was so little national interest in the vacant governorships in New Jersey and Virginia that there were no exit polls. This time around -- a year after Barack Obama's presidential landslide -- those same two off-year gubernatorial races are now viewed as deadly accurate barometers of the public mood.

The House race for an open seat in upstate New York's sprawling 23rd district would normally produce reverberations heard all the way from Oswego to . . . well . . . Plattsburgh. But because the challenge from Conservative insurgent Doug Hoffman forced the Republican nominee, moderate Dede Scozzafava, from the race, the over-hyped contest in NY-23 is being treated as if control of the universe hung in the balance.

Hoffman – the mild-mannered head of an accounting firm whose passions run to issues like the flat tax – is, in reality, far from a fire-breathing incendiary. In a telephone interview Monday night, I asked Hoffman if he intends in Washington to be a regular conservative presence on cable TV like, say, Minnesota's Michele Bachman. Judging from Hoffman's response, I could have just as well asked whether, if elected, he intended to buy Nancy Pelosi chocolates or flowers. "I'm going there to represent the voters of the 23rd District and work for what they need," Hoffman said. "Not to be a celebrity. That was never my intention in the first place."

To national political reporters, the turning point in Hoffman's third-party campaign came little more than a week ago when Sarah Palin backed him on Facebook. But to Hoffman, the endorsement that mattered the most was the early-bird blessing from politician-actor Fred Thompson and his wife Geri, who were campaigning for him Monday. As Hoffman said, with gratitude audible in his voice, "It was people like them, through my darkest hours, who kept me encouraged and finding power and going ahead when it looked absurd."

When Scozzafava endorsed Democrat Bill Owens Sunday, it was almost universally interpreted as a coup for the Democrats in a House district that has been Republican since the 19th century. But Jim McLaughlin, Hoffman's pollster, plausibly argues that the endorsement may have been a Pyrrhic victory. Referring to her perceived betrayal after she had dropped out of the race, McLaughlin said, "The endorsement re-energized the conservative base. They were prematurely declaring victory, high-fiving each other and getting ready to go home."

The truth is that off-year elections are wildly idiosyncratic and defy glib generalizations about the mood of America. In New Jersey, for example, unpopular and free-spending Democratic Governor Jon Corzine (whose largesse on behalf of his own political career has only been exceeded in American history by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) has never been able to rise above 44 percent in any poll taken this year. If Corzine falls short – despite a Democratic turnout advantage and three Obama visits to the state – it may be the political equivalent of the old advertising joke about the dog food that had everything going for it except "the dogs don't like it."

Virginia may be the state that illustrates that campaigns and candidates sometimes matter more than overarching political trends. A survey by Public Policy Polling released Monday – showing that Republican Bob McDonnell is leading Democrat Creigh Deeds by a double-digit margin – found that nearly two thirds of Virginians (66 percent) believe that Deeds failed to make "a strong case for why people should vote for him."

In a state that went Democratic for president in 2008 for the first time since the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide, it is devastating for Deeds that 42 percent of Obama voters have not heard a compelling reason to support him.

Now that it is plausible that the Democrats could lose all three races breathlessly covered on TV Tuesday night (although only the brave or foolhardy would confidently handicap New Jersey and NY-23), partisan Republicans are apt to attack as White House plants anyone who dares suggest that Campaign 2009 is not a referendum on Obama and Democratic control of Congress.

But even when it looked like the Democrats would be winning everything except Virginia, I have been arguing here at Politics Daily that two East Coast governor's races and an odd-ball congressional contest do not make up a valid national sample of anything.

But in politics – unlike rational forms of human endeavor – perceptions and reality tend to fuse. As Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said Monday at a reporters' breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, "In reality, I think 2009 says almost nothing about 2010." But Mellman did admit that a Democratic wipe-out would provoke "a certain amount of depression and soul-searching" in the party magnified by the "overboard generalizations" in the media.

All this might be a minor media blip – one that might fill the pre-Thanksgiving void on cable television – if political insiders (those not sophisticated about sample size and trends) were not inclined to take them so seriously. It is easy to imagine moderate congressional Democrats detecting in a potential GOP sweep an argument for trying to water down Obama's health-care bill. In similar fashion, Republican fund-raisers may have a new argument to woo back once dispirited major donors.

But beneath all this symbolism are some unavoidable truths. Doug Hoffman, even if he becomes Congressman Hoffman, is an unlikely tribune for conservative anger at the Republican establishment. Jon Corzine – a former Wall Street executive with all the charisma of a third-quarter earnings report – is an unlikely proxy for Barack Obama. And in Virginia, the soon-to-be forgotten Creigh Deeds failed to register with more than 40 percent of 2008 Obama voters.

In short, if it were not for political perceptions, there would be no national reality Tuesday night at all.