NEWS ANALYSIS : Democratic Ticket Has a Northern Cast : Election: Feinstein is first non-Southern Californian to win major party nomination for governor since 1966.

The overriding axiom of California politics since a massive shift of power in the 1960s has been that the votes and money--and therefore successful candidates--lie south of the Tehachapi Mountains.

But look what happened in Tuesday’s primary election: Democrats nominated almost a solid slate of northerners for statewide office.

Leading the Democratic ticket is former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the first Northern Californian to win a major party nomination for governor in 24 years, since Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown was chosen to run for a third term against Republican Ronald Reagan in 1966 and lost. In addition to the other northerners who won contested nominations Tuesday for statewide office, Bill Honig of San Francisco, was elected outright to a third term as the nonpartisan state superintendent of public instruction.

While the Republican slate in the Nov. 6 general election reflects growing areas of GOP strength, particularly in Orange and San Diego counties, that party’s ticket also includes a northerner, incumbent state Treasurer Thomas W. Hayes of Sacramento.

The Reagan sweep of 1966, coupled with court-ordered reapportionment that ended northern and rural control of the state Legislature, turned traditional California politics on its ear. Since then, southerners have dominated statewide races. It has almost been a political rule of thumb that, all other things being equal, a Southern California candidate will defeat a northerner.

But that political axiom proved untrue Tuesday. The northern wins captured the attention and imagination of California political experts. But generally they suggested the northern success was due to coincidence and the peculiar nature of each contest rather than any geographic flexing of political muscle.

One historian, however, said there was significance to the regional victories. Kevin Starr said the outcome reflected a trend toward the economic and political unification of urban Northern and Southern California.

“It’s a wonderful shift, a very important shift,” said Starr, a Bay-Area resident who commutes regularly to a teaching job at USC.

Increasingly linked by transportation and communication, the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor is emerging as “a city called California,” Starr observed. As old jealousies and points of pride blur, Southern Californians can be comfortable voting for northerners, he added. Northern Californians are recognizing the south as a dynamic world capital to which they are inextricably linked.

If elected, Feinstein also would be the first California chief executive to jump directly from local government into the state’s top elective office since Republican James Rolph Jr. was elected governor in 1930 while serving as San Francisco mayor. Her opponent in the Nov. 6 general election, Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson, also is a former mayor--of San Diego--and would be the first governor from that city in modern times.

Back in 1974, Pat Brown’s son Jerry came along to win the governorship back for Democrats, but by eschewing his San Francisco-Sacramento roots and consciously choosing Los Angeles as his political power base, first winning election to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

Today, as Feinstein goes against Wilson, she heads a ticket dominated by Northern Californians, including Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy; Arlo Smith, the San Francisco district attorney who was an upset winner over Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, and state Sen. John Garamendi of Walnut Grove, who defeated Southerners Bill Press and Conway Collis for the nomination to be the state’s first elected insurance commissioner.

The Republican slate more closely reflects the growing GOP power base in Southern California, although Wilson served in the capital as a member of the state Assembly in the 1970s, and Marian Bergeson of Newport Beach, the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, is an incumbent state senator who is respected by the Sacramento Establishment.

As for the Democrats, the only explanation political experts could give was that it was the strength of the candidate and the nature of the campaign that counted.

Reiner was far better known than Smith, his San Francisco counterpart, going into their contest but was plagued by far higher negative views among those familiar with his controversial career. The underdog Smith campaigned tirelessly throughout Southern California while Reiner made only token campaign forays into the North.

Feinstein ran as a candidate who could rise above geographic differences and bring disparate parts of California together. “Nobody thought I would get a plurality of votes in Southern California, but I did,” she told a San Francisco news conference Wednesday. “Our destinies are intertwined.”

But even with the success of all the candidates from the north, the fact remains, that “it would be fantasy to think that a Northern Californian could win without Southern California money,” said Robert Forsyth, an aide to Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles). “The money is still in the Los Angeles area.”