> The first sentence warns you cannot read too much into a single by
> election result. Then every following sentence makes exactly that
> assumption.

That's straight out of the "I'm not an unreasonable person but" book.* I heard many years ago that the trick is to read up to the "but", and take the inverse of what goes before it as the speaker's POV; the rest of the statement can then optionally be disregarded as too obvious to need to be stated.

* It's a standard rhetorical technique. Fifty bonus points for correctly naming it.