Last Wednesday, when my thoughts should have been directed toward what would turn out to be the final game of the World Series, I was distracted by a surge of analysis about the off-off-year elections.  Now, in all fairness, being neither a Yankees nor a Phillies fan, I wasn't as captivated by the World Series as I might have been.  Still, even if my hometown team had been in the Fall Classic (unlikely, since I originally hail from San Diego), I fear I would have still been overwhelmed by the political prognostications that flowed in every direction on Wednesday morning.

I suppose, given the steady increase in political analysis, which reached a fevered pitch during the elections last year, I shouldn't be too surprised by the articles and columns and breaking television reports and radio specials predicting the rise of one side and the fall of the other, or the exact opposite, depending on your choice of station.  Still, this wasn't a presidential election, or even an off year Congressional election.  There were two statewide contests and a special election for one Congressional seat representing parts of New York few even know exist, with a mayoral race thrown in for good measure because the incumbent is well known and spent enough money to run a small country.

While these races might normally be seen as relatively inconsequential from a national perspective, this year, pundits on both sides are trying to peer into the tea leaves and listen for the canary in the tunnel to figure out what the results mean for President Obama's agenda and the prospects of health care reform and the outcome of the war in Afghanistan and more.  Those on the right are seizing on Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey to predict the demise of Obama and his agenda.  Those on the left are pointing to the conservative defeat in upstate New York as an example of how the Republicans are still paralyzed by intra-party feuds.  Both sides are pouring over exit polls to answer the greatest political questions of our time: Should Republicans tack to the right or hew to the center?  Should Democrats take their policies further left, or try incorporating more "moderate" proposals?

Rather than look at those actual poll results, I decided to turn to a less conventional poll of my own: I went straight to my Facebook page.   I was curious to gauge the pulse of the nation and, as luck would have it, there's an app for that.  I used the power of millions of minds working on every kind of app imaginable to learn that a distressingly high proportion of my friends are liberals.  I was shocked - I always told myself that I'm fair and balanced and surround myself with different views and opinions.  But the statistics don't lie and, where it counts the most (my Facebook page), I evidently do the opposite.

I decided to investigate further.  Most of my liberal friends also had overwhelming blue looking pie charts cataloguing the political views of their friends.  And most of my conservative friends (the handful of them, that is) had rather red looking charts.  I thought this might be just a cyber-trend, but alas, I was disappointed in the real world as well.  In the 1976 elections, just a quarter of Americans lived in counties where either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate won in a landslide.  By 2008, almost half of Americans lived in overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic counties.  Politically speaking, at least, the country is looking less like a melting pot and more like ... a bowl of something that hasn't melted at all.

So what does this mean for the future of our nation?  Are we pulling ourselves apart and isolating ourselves from each other?  Maybe.  You can look at the results of the election last week to support that conclusion, I suppose:  in the New York special election, the socially moderate Republican was driven out of the race by a hard-line social conservative, who ultimately lost to the Democrat.  But you can probably also find contradictory evidence in Tuesday's results:  Governor-elect McDonnell in Virginia distanced himself from his socially conservative past and may have won in the middle.

So maybe we can learn something from the results of last week's elections after all:  voter after voter polled seemed less interested in the great political divide and more interested in results on the economy and health care and foreign policy and other issues.  So if the Democrats let their fear of the next election cycle grind their policies to a halt, 2010 will probably be a bad year for over 90 percent of my Facebook friends.  Then again, if Republicans keep saying no to ideas without offering up substance of their own, it could be hard to find any winners after the elections next year.  So maybe both sides could do with focusing a little less on the politics of politics, which might just mean tuning out the non-stop political analysis and punditry like this very column.