Okay, I'm reading this and that about what Tuesday's election means, and what the American people are saying, and I don't get it. There's a lot of talk about how this is becoming a war, if you'll excuse that imagery in light of today's other news, for the independent voter, and how the Democrats are losing their grip on the political center.

This is bullshit. Gallup reported that the split of independent voters was pretty even. Historically, midterm elections have always been about which party can get more of their faithful out to vote, and that's where the GOP crushed the Dems, plain and simple. Now I'm going to grant that I'm basing a lot of this analysis on the results of one poll, but I'm finding very little else available on the net to go on.

And that one poll has a lot of holes. For instance, it reports that only 26 percent of independents even votes, way behind the numbers for Republicans and Democrats, but without sizing that segment, it's hard to really gauge the full effect. At the same time, independent voters definitely were most likely to stay home, and the GOP, surprise, surprise, were most likely to vote. With President Bush barnstorming the U.S. as cheerleader-in-chief for the two weeks leading up to the elections, this should hardly be a surprise. What I don't see is how this translates to Americans being convinced that his policies are spot-on. The more obvious effect is that he convinced voters to already agreed with him to actually get up off of their couches and say so. Especially since the bump in the polls didn't happen until Bush got involved.

Which ultimately means the Democrats may be in an even bigger hole than some people are reporting. If they can't galvanize their own party to get out and vote in the first place, then the fight for the political center is entirely moot. And other turnout issues may plague the Dems further. They enjoyed a huge advantage among lower income and non-white voters, but obviously, those voting blocs were vastly outnumbered by their opposites. And the economy did resonate, to a degree, as about one-fourth of those polled rated the economy as poor, and that group leaned more to the left. I'm really curious about the 28% who rated the current economy as either excellent or good.

Do I have a point in all this? Sort of. The punditry seems hellbent on making grandiose pronouncements about what this all means, while they pass over the obvious, if more mundane, conclusions. Also, I'd be much much happier of Gallup would let me drill down into their data by just one more level, because there are some interesting questions that remain unanswered.