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Throughout the primary campaign, bitter Knight and Knowland forces worked desperately—and successfully—at cutting each other's Republican throats. Bill Knowland terrified his fellow Republicans by coming out foursquare for a right-to-work law. All other major Republican candidates frantically disavowed the Knowland gambit, and organized labor went out against Knowland as never before. But the most lasting effect of the Republican brawl was that it gave the Democrats the chance to attack a man of straightforward ways and impersonal honesty as a ruthless politician who had brutally shoved Goodie Knight aside to satisfy his own consuming ambitions. And who could better save California from such a tyrant than just plain Pat?
On primary day Californians voted by the millions against the brawling Republicans (TIME, June 16). For the first time in the 45-year history of California's famed cross-filing primary system, Democrats voted a straight party line, giving handsome pluralities to nearly all Democratic candidates, including Senatorial Candidate Engle. Pat Brown, predictably, led the way, walloping Bill Knowland by an astonishing 662,000 votes.
Changing Currents. With such a plurality, many a candidate would sit back on his fat margin, trusting to God, motherhood and still squabbling Republicans to keep him out of trouble. Brown knew better than anyone that post-primary factors would still be working in his favor, e.g., on the November ballot will be a proposition to take tax exemptions away from Roman Catholic and other privately endowed schools; with a huge Catholic vote expected against that proposition, Catholic Brown can only be a beneficiary.
But for all his foibles, Pat Brown has never yet been one to underrate an opponent or to miss the slightest eddy in the political current. For one thing, Knowland, tied closely to his Senate duties until last month, is now stumping California from border to border and just such stumping won him his senatorial seat over big-name Democrat Will Rogers Jr. in 1946. Knowland lacks Pat Brown's charm, but he knows what he thinks and says what he knows (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957)—and just such a reputation won him the senatorial nomination on both tickets in 1952. Conceivably, California's independent-minded voters, after a look at both candidates, might see more virtue in the man who can make up his mind as compared with the fellow who wants to please everybody. Moreover, in the primary Pat Brown had been able to retort to Knowland's right-to-work labor cry with his own recession-slanted back-to-work demands, California is now moving toward economic resurgence. More than that, Knowland's labor ideas, plainly stated and clearly understood, seem much more appealing in the light of a potentially dangerous West Coast strike by the corrupt Teamsters Union.
But to overcome his primary setback, Bill Knowland faces a statistically staggering job. To come within 100,000 votes of Brown in November, Knowland must 1) persuade seven of every ten registered Republicans to vote, 2) recapture the 23% of the Republican primary vote he lost to Brown, and 3) increase his 15% slice of the Democratic primary vote to some 25% in November.