New Crop of Governors

THE day after last week's elections, Research Director David Cooper of the Democratic National Committee peered out of his office window in Washington at the late afternoon darkness; lightning flashed, rain and hail pelted down. "That damn sky is about to drop on us," he joked. "Tell them we'll give them Michigan." As it turned out, Republican Governor William Milliken did get a new term in Lansing, but over most of the U.S. the Democrats were in sunshine. They dropped the sky on the G.O.P., turning a 32-18 Republican majority of gubernatorial chairs into a 29-21 Democratic advantage--subject to scattered recounts. Among the new men in the statehouses:

THE NORTHEAST. Pennsylvania Democrat Milton Shapp defeated Raymond Broderick by a 498,000-vote margin that astonished even Shapp. Under the reign of Governor Ray Shafer, political heir to the widely admired William Scranton, the state deficit rose to $500 million (the budget is currently $1.2 billion). Broderick's plans to cut spending antagonized large blocs of voters. Shapp, a wiry and intense millionaire, will become the Commonwealth's first Jewish Governor. "The people wanted a change," said Phrasemaker Shapp.

That was just what they wanted in Connecticut, too, where Republican Congressman Thomas Meskill will evict a Democrat from Hartford's gilt-domed statehouse after 16 years of one-party rule. Meskill, a former mayor of New Britain, came across forcefully on television. His opponent, Representative Emilio ("Mim") Daddario, who was once mayor of Middletown, "went through the campaign like a mummy," as one politico put it. Meskill accused the Democrats of doing nothing to curb drug abuse, which a specially commissioned G.O.P. state poll called the top issue on voters' minds. He capitalized on the $200 million deficit that Connecticut faces despite a sharp sales tax increase.

THE MIDWEST. The Democrats did best of all in a traditionally Republican region, taking five governorships from the Republicans. Ohio was their most important triumph; scandals over the handling of state loans blunted Republican Roger Cloud's law-and-order attack on former Representative John Gilligan, an attractive Democrat. Because spreading effects of the General Motors strike were putting Ohioans out of work, Gilligan pointed out that Cloud once voted against paying unemployment benefits to workers idled by a strike at another company. Gilligan is a reddish-haired, booming-voiced Irish American with a crushing handshake and a fiery temper that sometimes gets him into political trouble.

Democrats made law-and-order work for them in Wisconsin also by underlining the fact that Republicans were running the state when student violence erupted in Madison. Liberal Democrat Patrick Lucey, a longtime Kennedy ally and a former Lieutenant Governor, profited from vexation over rising property taxes. His opponent, Lieutenant Governor Jack Olson, promised to postpone state tax increases, but Republican Governor Warren Knowles torpedoed him in mid-campaign by announcing that a tax rise was inevitable in 1971.

Next door in Minnesota, Wendell Anderson, a 1956 Olympic hockey player who has spent twelve years in the state legislature, used an open, pleasant campaigning style--and Hubert Humphrey's coattails--to defeat Republican Douglas Head, the outgoing attorney general. South Dakota's Richard Kneip, a dairy equipment dealer and minority leader of the state senate, beat Republican incumbent Frank Farrar by accusing him of inadequate leadership in tax reform. Soaring taxes and spending did in Republican Governor Norbert Tiemann of Nebraska, who lost to J. James Exon, a Lincoln businessman (office machines and equipment) and former Democratic national committeeman.

THE SOUTH. Republicans picked up their only other seat from the Democrats in Tennessee, where Winfield Dunn defeated Democrat John J. Hooker Jr. partly as a beneficiary of the massive Nixon-Agnew assault on Democratic Senator Albert Gore. Dunn is a Memphis dentist and the son of a onetime Mississippi U.S. Representative. He pushed law-and-order; he opposed gun controls and promised to make Tennessee "unlivable for drug pushers."

But in Arkansas, two-term Governor Winthrop Rockefeller--the state's first Republican Governor since Reconstruction--spent an estimated $4,000,000 for re-election only to lose overwhelmingly to Democrat Dale Bumpers, a country lawyer from Charleston who turned back Orval Faubus' attempted comeback in the September primary. Rockefeller had been hamstrung for four years by a Democratic legislature; Bumpers promised to pull the state out of its mild stagnation. Crusty Rockefeller did himself no good by snapping back at a student who asked how much he was spending on reelection: "It's none of your damn business."

In Oklahoma, Republican Governor Dewey Bartlett promised not to increase taxes; Democrat David Hall, a portly, silver-haired former Tulsa County prosecutor who stumped the rural areas assiduously, went him one better by pledging tax relief for working-class families. Hall won by an unofficial margin of 2,819 votes, pending a possible recount.

Reubin Askew, a straight-arrow Democrat, took the starch out of Florida's rumbustious Governor Claude Kirk: "Government by antics," Askew cried, and 57% of the voters agreed. Askew is a refreshingly different newcomer to politics: a Presbyterian elder and a nonsmoking teetotaler who once said his favorite hobby is going to church. Kirk had managed to split the Republicans by pushing Judge G. Harrold Carswell into the U.S. Senate primary against Representative William Cramer.

Two Southern states moved toward moderation on the race issue. Georgia replaced Lester Maddox with another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, a wealthy peanut farmer; South Carolinians chose Democratic Lieutenant Governor John West--a lawyer and, like Florida's Askew, a staunch Presbyterian--rather than Republican Representative Albert Watson, a racist with strong backing from Strom Thurmond and Spiro Agnew. Said one relieved voter: "South Carolina has moved from the Deep South to the upper South."

THE WEST. Rancher Bruce King, who also heads a butane company, won the New Mexico governorship from Republican Pete Domenici largely on the strength of superior experience: King was speaker of the state house of representatives and president of the state's constitutional convention last year, while Domenici had only a middling record as head of the Albuquerque city commission to offer.

In Nevada, Democrat Mike O'Callaghan and Republican Ed Fike both took a hard line on crime and campus disturbances. It did not hurt O'Callaghan, a former schoolteacher, that the Republicans bungled a rebuttal to Columnist Jack Anderson's charges that Fike had taken part in shady land deals.

The only race where ecology turned into the clearest political issue was in Idaho. Cecil Andrus, 38, a Boise insurance executive, became the first Democrat elected Governor of the state since 1944. He defeated Incumbent Don Samuelson partly by opposing a Samuelson-backed mining development proposed for Idaho's scenic White Clouds region.

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