NEWS ANALYSIS : Trend Toward a ‘City Called California’ Seen in Election Results : Politics: A historian says regional conflicts between the North and South are giving way as the state unifies economically, politically and culturally.

California politicians pondered without particular conclusion Wednesday the dramatic success of Northern California candidates in Tuesday’s primary, but historian Kevin Starr said the balloting reflected a significant trend toward the economic, political and cultural unification of urban North and South.

“It’s a wonderful shift, a very important shift,” Starr said.

No longer is the San Francisco Bay Area smarting about being surpassed by metropolitan Los Angeles as the state’s economic and political power base. And Southern California “doesn’t have the cultural chip on its shoulder” it used to, said Starr, a Northern Californian who regularly commutes to a teaching job at USC.

Increasingly linked by transportation and communications, the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor is emerging as “a city called California,” added Starr, author of California histories titled “Inventing the Dream,” “Americans and the California Dream” and “Material Dreams.” Politically, Berkeley and Santa Monica have more in common than Berkeley does with some of its East Bay neighbors a few miles away in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, he said.

As old animosities and points of pride fade, Southern Californians find themselves comfortable voting for Northerners, Starr said. Northern Californians who take the time to get to know Southern California recognize it as a dynamic, maturing world capital to which they are inextricably linked economically, he said.

Former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, is the first Northern Californian to carry a major party banner for governor into a general election campaign in 24 years--since Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. of San Francisco ran unsuccessfully for a third term against Republican Ronald Reagan in 1966.

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 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 boyhood home ground and consciously choosing Los Angeles as his political power base, first winning election to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

Today, as she goes against Wilson, Feinstein 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. Bill Honig, who was elected to a third term as state superintendent of public instruction Tuesday, is from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Republican slate more closely reflects the growing GOP power base in Southern California, but appointed state Treasurer Thomas W. Hayes, who was nominated for a full term, is from Sacramento. 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 power Establishment.

The success of the Northerners captured the imagination of Sacramento political veterans Wednesday. But they declined to find dramatic patterns in the tea leaves.

“I guess we suffer the inevitable beltway mentality,” said Robert Forsyth, an aide to Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles). “We tend to discount L.A.--to assume that because Reiner’s L.A., Reiner gets it.”

Reiner was far better known than Smith, his San Francisco counterpart, going into their contest for the nomination for attorney general, but he also 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.

Forsyth and others attributed the success of other Northerners to characteristics of the individual candidates and contests rather than the strength of their geographic base. 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.”

If nothing else, the election demonstrates that being from the North is not, in itself, a barrier to statewide success. And the fact remains, Forsyth said, that “it would be fantasy to think that a Northern Californian could win without Southern California money. The money is still in the Los Angeles area.”

Feinstein’s edge over Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp of Los Angeles was remarkably uniform throughout much of California. Some of her biggest margins, with 56% of the vote, came not in her home city of San Francisco, but in Alameda County across the bay and in Sacramento.

Another Sacramento expert who declined to be identified said Feinstein’s success gives even more power to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), a close ally of Feinstein’s. But the expert said the primary’s other big legislative winner is a Southerner, Assemblyman Richard D. Katz (D-Sylmar), who helped write and lead the campaign for Proposition 111, the $18.5-billion transportation finance measure approved by voters Tuesday. Katz also was a major figure in promotion of Proposition 112, the successful legislative ethics program, and an initiative banning the trophy hunting of mountain lions in California.