On Friday’s edition of PBS’ Newshour, The New York Times’ David Brooks told moderator Judy Woodruff that the 2009 elections saw a major shift to the right among independent voters, particularly in the suburbs.

Now, maybe that’s true. If there was such a shift, I don’t see much evidence that portends a Republican tide in 2010. Still, there’s no doubt that New Jersey independents who voted for Obama in 2008 swung to Chris Christie (R) this time around.

Yet Brooks pointed to suburban, independent voters in Westchester County, NY, as proof that the indies have soured on Obama grown wary of deficit spending.

There’s just one problem with this: Westchester didn’t have any major elections. There were a few mayoral and judicial races, elections for county clerk, etc., but no races that could give any indication of the national political mood. Here’s the list of 2009 elections in Westchester, provided by the Times.

This is not to pick on Brooks, who, to be fair, is pretty independent-minded as pundits go. And I certainly don’t want to diminish the significance the election for Yorktown Supervisor. I’m sure it was a hard-fought campaign. But opinions stated as fact — particularly when they feed an existing political narrative — often go unchallenged. Sometimes, they’re demonstrably false.

UPDATE: Brooks wrote pretty much the same thing in his column. Maybe he’s referring Andy Spano, who has been Westchester County’s Executive since I was a freshman in high school (and no, that was not recently). He did go down to defeat on Tuesday.

Perhaps losing the Westchester County Executive’s race foreshadows doom nationally, but I don’t see it. Still, take a look at the election results, and judge for yourself. From my standpoint, it seems like an awfully big stretch to point to a handful of county-level races in a low-turnout, off-year election, and say it constitutes a wave.

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