WASHINGTON » Note to incumbents: That experience thing? Stop bragging about it.

And you Republicans ready to start celebrating major gains - maybe even looking ahead to winning control of Congress this fall. You might want to let voters have a say first.

It's difficult to draw conclusions for November from the early round of primaries and a single partisan election in a campaign season that has produced consistently confounding results. But those two seem safe, at least for now.

Facing career-ending defeat a few weeks apart, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah and Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both invoked their experience.

“;With Jack Murtha gone, I'm the only guy left standing with seniority and experience,”; Specter told a small group of supporters inside an airplane hangar on Tuesday, recalling the late lawmaker, famous for sending millions in federal funds back to his southwestern Pennsylvania district.

A few hours later, Specter was a loser for the first time in 30 years, a five-term incumbent and recent party switcher who fell to a younger, less experienced rival who said the veteran senator was an opportunist whose time had “;come and gone.”;

It was hardly a surprising outcome when Rep. Joe

Sestak, the winner, cast it in those terms.

But it was a defeat made all the more remarkable because of the extraordinary political survival skills Specter had shown for decades as a moderate in a Republican Party.

Bennett pulled out the same trump card earlier this month in Utah.

“;Don't take a chance on a newcomer. There's too much at stake,”; he said to GOP convention delegates, tea party activists among them.

Now the incumbent muses about running as a write-in, denied a spot on the primary ballot by some of the same delegates who cheered him six years earlier. In the end, he was bounced for voting to bail out Wall Street in 2008, for trying to work across party lines on health care and more.

Lesson two is a caution to Republicans eagerly looking ahead to major gains this fall, possibly even a huge wave that sweeps them into power in one or both houses of Congress.

Case in point was Democrat Mark Critz's victory Tuesday over Republican Tim Burns in a race to fill out the final few months of Murtha's term. Both parties plunked down

$1 million or more to sway the outcome in the district, home to more Democrats than Republicans. And GOP officials did nothing to discourage the chatter when pundits pronounced it a race the GOP couldn't afford to lose.

Except they did, and convincingly, 53 percent to

45 percent, in a district where Republican presidential candidate John McCain won in 2008, where President Barack Obama's approval ratings are in the 35 percent range and where the administration's energy policy may seem threatening to any of the thousands employed in the region's coal industry.

Some Republicans read the returns and came to a curious conclusion.

“;This race should serve notice to Democratic officeholders everywhere that no seat is safe and that voters will not accept business as usual,”; said Michael Steele, the Republican national chairman.

A different explanation argues that Democrats successfully stressed the importance of creating jobs at home, as opposed to overseas, while the GOP ran against Critz as a liberal who would vote for the agenda advanced by Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Critz said he would not have voted for the health care legislation, although he also said he wouldn't vote to repeal it. And he wanted nothing to do with the so-called “;cap and trade”; energy bill the House cleared last year.

That's not likely to be much help for dozens of incumbent Democrats who will be on the ballot this fall, and possibly under attack from Republicans for voting for one or the other.

But it could provide a road map for Democrats in

districts where Obama isn't too popular, and the health care law isn't either.