In GOP They Trust

As four vintage military planes soared above the second annual Veterans Day parade here last month, all eyes turned skyward.

Suddenly, one plane veered west, alone. The empty space where the plane had flown was a tribute to those who’ve died in defense of freedom. Eyes misted over. Young parents snapped pictures. Old men saluted.

Mayor Jack van Haaster commemorated the somber fly-by: “We give tribute to those whose lives were lost in service to their country.” Then he clambered into a shiny convertible to lead high school bands and candy-tossing Marines, car clubs and Scout troops on a mile-long swing around the unfinished center of this fast-growing, young, Republican city.

Here in the stout heart of red California, voters snort with disdain when they hear that President Bush’s strong victory caught America’s Democrats by surprise. Not a single Murrieta precinct swung Sen. John Kerry’s way in the bitterly fought 2004 election; in many parts of town, 70% or more of the electorate cast ballots for Bush -- a strong show of red unity in one of America’s bluest states.

The same values that drew voters here to Bush in the first place also led many of them to Murrieta, the self-proclaimed gem of the Temecula Valley, where streets are safe, schools are good and housing is more affordable than in many other parts of California.

Churches outnumber bars here some 15 to one, 40% of the residents are of school age, and 71% are white. Murrieta’s population has quadrupled since 1990, as thoroughbred ranches and chaparral-covered hills due east of Orange County have given way to subdivisions with names like Pacific Oaks, Sedona, Meadowlane.

“People come here with their families, and they want a conservative lifestyle that they can re-create,” said Mayor Pro Tem Kelly Seyrato, who moved here nearly 15 years ago with his wife from Los Angeles County so they could buy a house and start a family. “We were able to recapture the fresh neighborhood of the ‘60s feel.... It had a lot of promise out here.”

Boomtown California is Republican California, and this 13-year-old city of 77,661 could be its capital -- bustling with earth-moving equipment and flag men, bristling with signs that promise “Coming Soon!” and “Starting in the $200,000’s,” Murrieta is all road construction and just-framed subdivisions and a parade route that navigates delicately through the confusion.

Bush lost California resoundingly last month, so it is easy to forget that more people voted for him in this state than in any other in America. With population and political clout clustered in Democratic Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s also easy to overlook the rapid spread of conservative California.

Since 1992, the number of California counties with more registered Republicans than voters of any other party has nearly tripled, from 13 to 37 out of 58. That growth has shaped exurbs such as Murrieta, where “we’re red. We’re getting redder ... [and] the Democrats don’t even bother to organize,” said Shaun Bowler, professor of political science at UC Riverside.

As Republicans migrate farther from California’s aging cities, the state has become increasingly split, to the point that “we’re as polarized as the nation, if not more so. It’s a problem,” said political analyst Tony Quinn. “You have to have some cooperation to get things done in California. We have a [political] structure that favors cooperation and interaction between the two parties. But the middle ground seems to be giving way.”

Some political experts believe that there is more similarity between the state’s red and blue voters than either group knows, and that California’s moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans would realize their common ground if only they would talk. The problem, though, is that they don’t, particularly in veritable one-party enclaves such as southwest Riverside County.

“The [state’s] Democrats talk to the Bay Area,” rued UC Riverside’s Bowler, “ ... and they’re not talking to people out on the freeways, the commuters.”

Like the people who live here in the Temecula Valley, who drive for hours between houses they can afford and jobs they can’t afford to leave. They gathered at the Veterans Day parade last month to celebrate their shared values. And that’s as good a place as any to start for a little conversation about what California’s Republicans believe and why they believe it.

The Columnist

Shortly after the equestrian groups had clip-clopped by with their shovel-wielding escorts, Rick Reiss drove down Adams Avenue in his silver Hummer, freshly washed and filled with graying comrades from American Legion Post 852.

Reiss works full time on the engineering staff of the federal prison in San Diego and is a part-time columnist for the local newspaper. His views on Bush’s victory had appeared in The Californian just before the parade, in a column that was part paean to the president, part celebration of conservative Riverside County -- and part dare.

“Buck up,” he wrote to the state’s “despairing liberals.” “Before fleeing to Canada, consider getting to know some of your many conservative Southwest County neighbors. You might just learn a thing or two. I promise you, they will not bite.”

And just what would these “leftists within the Democratic Party” learn if they spent some time with Reiss, a 40-year-old Navy veteran and father of two?

He is more of a small-government Republican, he says, than a social conservative. He believes that abortion should be an option for victims of rape and incest and for women whose health would suffer if they carried a pregnancy to term.

He says he thinks that what people do in their bedrooms is their own business, but he doesn’t want homosexuality discussed in his children’s schools because “I don’t think schools should indoctrinate.” He has trouble explaining why he’s against stem cell research.

Reiss has a libertarian streak and hates taxes, particularly measures like Proposition 63, which proposed a levy on Californians earning more than $1 million a year to pay for mental health care for the poor. The measure won handily statewide last month; tellingly, it went down to defeat in Riverside County, even though there are only 446 people here who meet that income threshold.

“Whenever I hear politicians say they’re going to raise taxes on the rich, I think, ‘What’s rich?’ ” Reiss said, and he’s not alone. “To some politicians, it’s $80,000. In California, that’s just getting by.”

Reiss lives in neighboring Temecula and drives 124 miles round trip each day to work so that he can afford to own a home, like many of his neighbors in nearby cities such as Murrieta and Lake Elsinore, Wildomar and Menifee. A survey by local governments shocked regional planners with its finding that most people here, like Reiss, are willing to drive hours to work if the trade-off is a house, a yard and a mortgage.

Reiss came by his conservatism in the bosom of a “cop family.” To be a conservative, he said, is to believe in “natural rights.” Natural rights means self-defense. And self-defense, of course, means guns. He talks about this a lot.

During Reiss’ childhood in Westlake Village, the house was always unlocked -- and so was the gun cabinet. When his mother and stepfather got home from their shifts with the Los Angeles Police Department, he said, “They’d put their service guns on top of [the cabinet]. It wasn’t an issue.”

“When they had the riots in L.A., and I saw the Korean store owners protect themselves with shotguns, it made things crystal clear for me. I don’t consider myself to be a gun nut. They’re tools,” he said. “You can do good things with tools and you can do bad things with tools.”

Sure, he’s seen “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore’s film on America’s obsession with firearms. Sure, he acknowledges that the Columbine shooting was a tragedy, that kids shouldn’t be able to take weapons into high schools and blow innocent classmates away.

“But when Michael Moore says we have to ban all guns, I find that personally insulting,” Reiss said. “It’s saying I was raised wrong. To tell me that because I own a gun I’m a criminal or wrong, that’s insulting.”

The Boy Scout Troop

“Insulting” is probably the kindest word that Bruce and Laurie Blanton would use to describe the greater part of America’s media.

This devout Mormon couple, whose Boy Scout son Christopher marched on Veterans Day with his uniformed pals from Troop 524, will not see a movie that is rated R. They lump Whoopi Goldberg in with Dan Rather, the Dixie Chicks with CNN. They put Moore, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and most of Hollywood in the same bad grab bag of the biased and the out-of-touch.

They believe that the news industry is peopled with hard-core Democrats -- even conservative Fox network, insisted an indignant Bruce Blanton. And they feel that the entertainment industry has coarsened this country’s culture by shoving sex, violence and profanity in the faces of a defenseless public.

But what really, really infuriates the Blantons is the arrogance they perceive when they switch on the television set, open the newspaper, walk into a movie theater, listen to the radio.

Where do these people come off telling us whom to vote for? How dare they think that their views matter, just because they have big salaries and pretty faces? It’s a theme they return to over and over in a two-hour conversation in their Murrieta home, with its frontyard flagpole and minivan in the driveway.

Bruce, 44: “I had a lot of respect for [CNN international correspondent] Christiane Amanpour. But after Bush won the first election, she was at a press luncheon addressing the media. She said, ‘How could we allow this person to have won?’ I lost all respect. They thought they had control and the right to pick.”

Laurie, 41: “It really, really disgusted me.”

Bruce: “The media made me vote the way I did.”

Laurie: “It’s always killed me. Just because you’re beautiful and on TV, it means I want to see you on a show. But I don’t care about your opinion about what candidate you like. As much as I enjoy the music of the Dixie Chicks, the minute [lead singer Natalie Maines] bashed the president, I lost some respect. Her songs would come on the radio, and I’d change the channel. They were rude and obnoxious.”

So where do the Blantons get their information? For Bruce, at least, the same place as many of his neighbors, men and women whose affordable homes are here in Murrieta but whose jobs are geographically undesirable. Trapped in their cars en route to the office, they listen to talk radio on their long commutes.

A good day for Bruce means 2 1/2 hours round trip between his neat subdivision and his job as chief engineer at the Holiday Inn on the Bay in San Diego. He whiles away the time listening to Fox radio and books on tape, including such disparate favorites as Tom Clancy suspense novels and the Bible.

One recent day, he said, he tuned in conservative talk show host Tony Snow, and the topic turned to teens and sex. It’s an important issue for the Blantons, whose children are 12, 14 and 17. Keeping kids out of trouble, Bruce explained, is why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the Boy Scouts as part of its youth program. It’s why Alexander and Christopher are both active Scouts and why the Blantons’ 17-year-old daughter has belonged to 4-H and works part time.

And it was why Snow spoke and Bruce listened, wending his way along Interstate 15.

“To me, children having sex at a younger and younger age is a bad thing,” Bruce said, partly recounting the gist of the show, partly emphasizing his own strong beliefs. “You keep telling them no. You don’t give them an out.... If you don’t want them to have sex, don’t tell them where the condoms are.”

The Brownie Troop

Joe Russo remembers the daily commute to Orange County from Encinitas, where he couldn’t afford to buy a house and his wife, Juliana, had to work. That’s the only way they could make ends meet. It was 1998. “On my commutes, I’d listen to Christian radio, getting a daily infusion while driving on the road,” he said. “You have a lot of time on the road to think.”

Russo thought about life. And Jesus. And the path to salvation. About what he believed and what he needed. He thought about the layers the Catholic Church -- the bedrock of his childhood -- can put between a man and his experience of God.

“You don’t have to do all these things to be saved. Put your faith in Jesus, and he’ll take it from there,” Russo said, describing a conversion to fundamentalist Christianity that began behind the wheel of his car. “Listening to the radio on my daily drives got me thinking more and more in that direction.”

These days, the Russos live in Murrieta, where they worship at Sun Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational, Bible-based congregation. They own their own home, a comfortable earth-tone ranch house in a crisp subdivision. An American flag flies just outside the living room window. There’s a Santa sign on the picket fence. A spray of autumn leaves brightens the front door.

After Joe’s old company moved to Salt Lake City, he started a real estate appraisal business and works from home. Things are a little slow right now, but he has high hopes. Juliana no longer runs a home-based day care center, as she did when they lived in pricier San Diego County. She’s the leader of Brownie Troop 594 and marched with Gabriella, 6, on Veterans Day.

“I was proud to be there,” Juliana said. “I had never been in a parade. It was a new experience.... There was a huge number of Girl Scouts there. That was just awesome.”

The 35-year-old stay-at-home mom hates to talk politics; she’s a live-and-let-live conservative. She believes in family values and the right to life, but doesn’t give a shake about gay marriage. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she shrugged. “I think you’re either born that way or not. If you’re not harming anyone, you should be able to live your life.”

She says many of her family values likely come from Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the conservative talk radio personality and self-help author, whose books she reads when she can find the time in her hectic days with her two young children.

“I didn’t really get them from my mom and dad,” she said. “My dad is dead. My parents divorced early. My mom occasionally lived with a boyfriend or had a boyfriend sleep over. I would never do that if I were in that situation. She wasn’t a bad mom, but she came first. I’m not that way.”

Juliana got most of her information about the presidential election from husband Joe, also 35 and one of George W. Bush’s most persuasive surrogates in the corner of Murrieta where the Russos live. “That’s why you need to talk to him,” she said, “not me.”

And what does Joe say? Even though he served as a Marine in the Persian Gulf War, the current combat in Iraq barely figured in his vote. The government, he said, should have a small role in Americans’ lives, building roads, protecting borders, providing education and a strong national defense.

His belief in small government ends where his social conservatism begins, but he loses no sleep over the contradiction: Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, and marriage should be defined in the Constitution as strictly between a man and a woman.

If there’s an area where both political parties have failed, he said, it’s the highly charged issue of immigration. Neither Bush nor Kerry learned a thing from what he considers the worthless 1986 legislation that granted legal status to many undocumented workers.

“These people don’t have to take tests,” Joe said, referring to illegal immigrants who have come to this country. “They have diseases. It’s a national health and safety issue. Terrorists come in through the Mexican border, where they can blend in. And we’re spending too much money for people who shouldn’t be here.”

The Activists

They are sitting around a table at Mimi’s Cafe on a commercial strip in nearby Temecula, a city so close to Murrieta in geography and temperament that it’s hard to tell where one bedroom community ends and the other begins.

The three activists belong to Temecula Valley Republican Women Federated, and this part of southwest Riverside County is their territory. It is where, in advance of election day, they spent every free hour standing outside strip malls and churches, Albertsons and Wal-Mart, in pursuit of a GOP Holy Grail.

“We had a goal,” said retired teacher Adele Harrison, 60, “to have enough or more Republican registrations in Riverside County to offset the San Francisco vote.”

“It was an identification by the Riverside Republican Committee of what we could do to offset places that would hurt us,” added Linda Woods, 64, who heads the organization now and proudly notes that her members signed up 1,640 new Republicans this year.

Harrison had hoped for even more: political pile-on, Democratic humiliation and the Nov. 2 ouster of Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democrat Republicans love to hate: “We were hoping Bush would take it early, and the Democrats in California would be so discouraged that they wouldn’t have come out to vote, and maybe we would have gotten a new senator.”

Harrison’s kindergarten students would end the year knowing a full repertoire of patriotic songs. She jokes that she timed her retirement so she could attend the Republican National Convention in New York City. She is the strong middle link in a three-generation chain of determined, activist Republican women.

Her daughter, Keri Folmar, is a congressional lawyer who left work to home-school her children; Folmar helped write the first ban on so-called partial-birth abortion when she was an aide to Rep. Charles Canaday of Florida. In addition to her efforts with the local Republican Party, Harrison opens up her home to unwed pregnant teenagers so they can carry their babies to term.

Forty years ago, Harrison’s mother, Ruth Oates, who ran a sporting goods store with her husband, never hesitated to do battle with the teachers at Whittier High School, who she believed were spouting ideology instead of facts, slamming the Founding Fathers for owning slaves and having mistresses.

“My mom didn’t want teachers to teach revisionist history ... from the PC point of view,” Harrison said. “Even in my day she was down talking to my history teachers about how they were denigrating Benjamin Franklin. They took the worst things that the forefathers were alleged to have done and didn’t talk about the good things.”

Harrison said she remembered her mother’s battles when she took a state-mandated course about meeting the needs of bilingual children in which “they showed us films on how horrible we’d been to everyone -- hangings in the South -- not the great things, like civil rights,” she said, affronted still. “We need to teach children to love America, not hate America.”

Harrison loves her country, and so does the president, she said. It’s one of the major reasons she trusts him to lead the nation in the war in Iraq. Strong countries, she said, need to help weak ones. “George Bush believes, as I do, that we are blessed to be in America,” she said. “We are blessed to be a blessing to others. That’s why we needed to go into Iraq.”

The Military Wife

Jessie Gulbrandsen made it to parade’s end, still smiling. Somewhere along the route, the 6-year-old Brownie had handed off the folded American flag she carried, which had covered the casket of her troop leader’s grandfather, a World War II veteran. Too heavy.

As Jessie marched by, her 2-year-old sister, Toni Marie, dumped purple yogurt down the front of her sweater. Brother Vincent, age 4, threatened his wailing younger sibling with the butt end of an American flag. He was decked out in kiddie camouflage. He calls them his “Daddy clothes.”

“Daddy” is Maj. Paul Gulbrandsen, 33, and on this day, he is somewhere just outside Ramadi helping to fight the war in Iraq as comptroller for the 1st Marine Division. Angela Gulbrandsen, 30, misses her husband every day.

“Anything I do without him is hard. It’s been bothering me lately. I see families where the man stays home to watch a game” instead of going on a family outing, she said. “It hurts, because, if [Paul] were here, he’d be with us.... Otherwise, I’m overwhelmingly proud. Proud that the parade is going on. Proud of what he’s doing. Proud of what I am -- I’m his wife, and we’re his family.”

Few things have shaped Gulbrandsen’s life and politics as much as her family and the U.S. Marine Corps. Being a mother has made this Catholic and registered independent a little less supportive of abortion rights. Being a military wife means national security is key. She remembers presidential elections by where the family was stationed and whom she was pregnant with -- 2000: Bush; South Carolina; Vincent.

She’d have voted for the president this time too, if only her registration papers had not been lost.

The Long Island native had always voted as an absentee resident of New York, but then she and Paul bought their house in Murrieta, and she decided to vote like “normal people.” Applying for a California driver’s license, she registered to vote under the motor-voter program.

But when she got to the polling place at Jessie’s elementary school on election day, her name was nowhere to be found. The process of filing a provisional ballot would have taken more time than she had: There were children to pick up.

So she sobbed. And then she prayed “for whoever wins, as long as my husband’s in good hands.”

But the best hands, she said, belong to Bush, a “consistent leader” who believes in the war and the troops and will bring them home safely. Like many here, she bristled every time John Kerry said he would have handled Iraq differently. Like many here, she believes that changing leaders in the middle of a war is a bad idea.

And like many here, she takes comfort in the kindness of friends and neighbors, who believe in the things that she finds important. On Paul’s last tour, an acquaintance had scoffed at the danger he faced in Iraq. How bad could it be for someone whose job title is “comptroller”? She’s found new friends since then, “a good group of Christian women,” who are helping her through this tough time.

“Now I see the family values and the goodness of people,” she said, as she made Sunday dinner after Mass. “I thought you could be a good person and a good friend if you didn’t live my values. Now, I trust the ones who follow my values. That’s what I’m learning, living out here.”

Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.