Nimble Crisscrossing

In the West, the main winner was Jerry Brown

The biggest winner in the West last week was, in a sense, California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown. With his stunning 1.3 million-vote victory over G.O.P. Challenger Evelle Younger, the state's attorney general, Brown greatly enhanced his stature as a politician with national clout and national aspirations.

But Brown's popularity was not enough to keep voters in California, as in the rest of the West, from crisscrossing nimbly from one column to another. Although they generally ignored party labels, they followed a consistent theme: they rewarded candidates who favored conservative issues such as limits on government spending, tax cuts and tougher law enforcement. It was the G.O.P. that profited most from this trend. Altogether, Republicans in the region netted one additional seat in the U.S. Senate, three in the House of Representatives and two governorships.

The voters' swerve to the right was especially dramatic in Oregon's gubernatorial contest. After more than two decades as a citadel of liberalism, the state unexpectedly ousted Bob Straub, 58, a Democrat, and voted in Republican Victor Atiyeh, 55, a conservative state senator. But Oregon's voters were as inconsistent as those elsewhere. They re-elected Mark Hatfield, a perennially popular G.O.P. liberal, to a third term in the Senate.

Atiyeh, the son of Syrian immigrants, will be the nation's first Governor of Arab descent. In a vigorous grass-roots campaign, he traveled 40,000 miles, relentlessly calling for tax relief for homeowners. Straub apparently misread the antitax mood until very late in the campaign. Said Atiyeh after his victory: "I think the phrase from the movie Network covers what I've been hearing during this campaign: 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.' "

This conservative leaning was apparent in most of the other Western races in which offices changed hands. In Colorado, Republican Congressman William Armstrong denied Democrat Floyd Haskell a second term in the Senate. Compared with the vigorous Armstrong, the courtly, soft-spoken Haskell sounded unconvincing when he vowed to fight inflation and cut taxes. Similar issues in Nevada buried Lieutenant Governor Robert Rose, who tried to keep the governorship in Democratic hands after Incumbent Mike O'Callaghan retires at year's end. Republican Attorney General Robert List handily defeated Rose, again by calling for tax cuts.

The conservative trend, however, had limits; extreme rightists ran into trouble. Thus liberal Democrat Dick Lamm hung on to his job as Colorado's Governor by defeating archconservative Ted Strickland. In New Mexico, a Democratic moderate, Bruce King, beat archconservative Joe Skeen for the governorship.

In California, the key to Brown's victory was his success in convincing voters that he was, as he put it, a "born-again tax cutter." This was a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek reference to his original opposition to Proposition 13, the tax-slashing referendum that Californians overwhelmingly approved in June.

After the measure passed, Brown demonstrated his dazzling ability as a political alchemist by transforming adversity to advantage. He completely reversed field to champion the antitax drive. He froze state hiring and wages and signed a $1 billion tax cut. Complained State G.O.P. Chairman Michael Montgomery last week: "The Democrats stole the antitax issue before we had a chance to really pick it up and run with it."

Brown won big almost everywhere. He polled 85% of the Democrats' votes and 55% of those cast by independents. Even Republicans gave him 24% of their ballots, and he piled up commanding margins over Younger in conservative bastions like Orange and San Diego counties. He did especially well in ethnic communities, winning support from 79% of the Hispanics, 94% of the blacks and 69% of the Jews.

Brown ran particularly hard because his popularity had plunged in the wake of his original opposition to Proposition 13. He outtalked, outtraveled and outspent ($4 million vs. $3 million) Younger. The generally bland challenger tried to persuade voters that the frugal 40-year-old bachelor Governor had a "strange" lifestyle. But Brown managed to convince Californians that he was politically more astute than Younger, 60, who has held public office for the past 25 years and had lost none of his six previous election campaigns. Despite his political experience, Younger committed a number of blunders. The most serious may have been his going off to Hawaii on a long vacation immediately after his primary win. This enabled Brown to dominate the political scene back home and grab the campaign initiative.

Brown's victory was a lonely landslide. Despite his impressive majority, he failed to carry many other Democrats into office with him. Three-term Congresswoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a nationally respected black, was defeated in her bid for attorney general by Republican State Senator George Deukmejian. Also quashed was the re-election bid of Brown's running mate, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. Partly because Dymally was tainted by rumors of a pending indictment for corruption, Brown kept away from him until the campaign's final week. By then it was too late to prevent Michael Curb, a conservative Republican, from capturing the state's second highest office.

Brown last week ritually declined to say whether he will become an active presidential candidate. Said he: "I'm not locking anything in, not locking anything out." If he does decide to run, his remarkable showing last week should make it a lot easier for him to raise a war chest for the costly primary campaigns. In some respects, Brown already sounds like a national political leader. Surveying the election results, he urged his fellow Democrats to cut government costs "to make [our] words match reality."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.