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...