A Toss-'Em-Out Temper

From Ohio to Nebraska, voters were grumpy over high taxes and governmental waste. They cast their ballots against the status quo and turned out of office three Senators and three Governors. As a result, Republicans made some significant gains, and where Democrats managed to prevail, they tended to be conservatives.

The most stunning shift occurred in Minnesota, usually one of the most liberal states in the nation, where Republican victories jolted the long dominant Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (see box). Of significance elsewhere for the political future were the solid gains made by Republicans in a number of state legislatures. The G.O.P. went into the election controlling both houses of legislature in only two Midwestern states (South Dakota and Nebraska) but won enough victories to take over both chambers in four additional states: Iowa, Kansas, Indiana and North Dakota. In influential Illinois, Republicans made strong gains in both houses of the legislature, only narrowly missing control.

One of the most impressive Republican winners was Illinois Governor James ("Big Jim") Thompson, who defied the region's anti-incumbency trend to win reelection by some 600,000 votes. His feisty Democratic opponent, State Comptroller Michael Bakalis, failed to find any effective way of attacking Thompson, who had kept his 1976 election promises to cut spending, balance the state budget and hold down taxes.

Running hard to pile up a big vote, Thompson stumbled badly on just one issue. He was so eager to capitalize on the tax revolt that he sponsored a non-binding "Thompson proposition," asking voters whether they wanted to put a limit on both spending and taxes in the state. Underestimating the difficulty of rounding up the necessary 589,000 petition signatures in a hurry, Thompson put the pressure on political aides to deliver—and they wound up compiling names of some voters who had never seen a petition. Bakalis responded by crying fraud, but to no avail.

After his win, the easygoing Thompson promised more of the same solid, if unspectacular, leadership during his second term that he provided during his first two years in office. He brushed aside inevitable speculation about a possible presidential candidacy in 1980. Said he: "Before anybody runs for President, he'd better have the makings of a President. He must demonstrate the qualities and abilities to be President." Thompson clearly hopes to do just that in his next two years as Governor.

Kansas Republicans achieved the historic feat of sending the first woman to a full term in the Senate without any help from a husband's previous political career.* To be sure, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, 46, did not hide the fact that she was 1936 Presidential Candidate Alf Landon's daughter, no handicap in Kansas despite Landon's humiliating loss to F.D.R. But she proved a candid and outgoing campaigner, and her fresh personality meshed neatly with the voters' yearnings for change. Her opponent, Democrat Bill Roy, a physician and lawyer, had run unsuccessfully for the Senate before and had been prominent long enough in Kansas politics to take on the aura of an oldtimer.