For all the efforts of both parties to spin the results of yesterday's off-year elections as holding great national significance, the results look to us like a mixed bag with good and bad news for Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans will rightly crow about winning governorships in Kentucky and Mississippi. Indeed, the cry is already rising that the results show the GOP now has a lock on the South, where Democrats will never win an election again, blah blah blah. We've heard it all before, and there's no real evidence that Republicans have finally reached that great gettin' up morning when they dominate the South from the top to the bottom of the ballot, any more than they did in other "decisive" election cycles from 1966 through 1994. Governor's elections everywhere tend to be cyclical. By our count, the incumbent party has lost 15 of 23 southern gubernatorial elections since 1998. The number could go up on November 15 if Democrat Kathleen Blanco beats Republican Bobby Jindal in a general-election runoff in Louisiana. (Polls currently show the candidates dead even.)

The perils of party incumbency in tough times were especially evident in Kentucky, where by all accounts Democrat Ben Chandler's loss to Republican Ernie Fletcher was attributable to a messy sex scandal involving outgoing governor Paul Patton. With Democrats having held the governorship for more than 30 years, it was easy for the GOP to capitalize on voter frustrations with "the mess in Frankfort."

Elsewhere, there was much better news for Democrats, who took back control of the New Jersey legislature, held on to City Hall in Philadelphia, and made gains in the Virginia House while apparently breaking the spine of a Republican anti-tax insurgency in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Democrat Bill White is also favored over Republican Orlando Sanchez in a mayoral runoff in Houston.

But our favorite result was the solid first-place finish by a New Democrat in the unlikely venue of the San Francisco mayor's race. Supervisor Gavin Newsom, who gained national attention for his tough love initiative to give the growing ranks of San Francisco's homeless population a hand-up in services rather than a handout in cash assistance, ran on a common-sense reform platform, and won 41 percent of the vote. He will now face a runoff against Green Party member and president of the city board of supervisors Matt Gonzalez. Newsom is favored to win the runoff, which will offer city voters a very clear choice between hard-left and center-left versions of the progressive political tradition.