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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."