GOP Senate Hopeful Woos Yuppies : Assemblyman Naylor Says New Breed Is ‘Up for Grabs’

To retailers, they are Yuppies. To pollsters, they are the restless tens of thousands who voted last year for Democrat Gary Hart in the presidential primary and then for President Reagan in the fall.

To Republican Robert W. Naylor, they represent his hopes for moving up from the state Assembly to the U.S. Senate.

Sixteen months, or 474 days before primary Election Day in 1986, the energetic assemblyman from Menlo Park entered the Republican U.S. Senate primary Wednesday with an open, look-to-the-future appeal to these nonaligned, 40-and-under voters.

“As I begin this race, I believe I am part of a new conservative generation,” the 41-year-old Naylor said at the campaign’s early press conferences in five cities.

“In the field (of Republican hopefuls), I may be the best spokesman for that generation of voters. . . . They are looking for a political home; I think they are up for grabs.”

A former GOP leader of the Assembly, Naylor became the second Republican to announce early his candidacy for the right to challenge three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston.

By his own account, Naylor begins the race less well known than the other declared GOP candidate, former Los Angeles police chief and state Sen. Ed Davis of Valencia. But Naylor argued that he brings to the race strong organizational potential and a fund-raising base that begins in his Silicon Valley-area Assembly district and extends outward by virtue of contacts he made during three years as Assembly GOP leader.

Besides Naylor and Davis, at least seven other Republicans have expressed more or less serious interest in the primary election.

At least one of these, supply side economic analyst Arthur B. Laffer, also is seeking to appeal to young, success-oriented voters. Laffer’s campaign remains in the exploratory stage, and he said in a recent interview that he felt no rush to formally join the battle.

For his part, Naylor, accompanied by his wife and two grade-school children during a daylong prop-stop across California, spoke of regional factors that he felt could affect the outcome of the GOP primary.

Of the likely contenders, Naylor noted, only he resides in the northern part of the state, a happenstance that he said could be of value in a field crowded by Southern Californians.

Soft-spoken with an easy sense of humor, Naylor’s politics are eclectic and hard to label, like the politics of many of the young voters he seeks to woo. He is rigidly conservative on budgetary matters, in favor of free choice on abortion, in favor of the equal rights amendment, suspicious of government regulation and supportive of education. On environmental matters, his record ranges from siding with farmers on pesticide issues to advocating alternative energy to the extent that he was labeled “solar legislator of the year” in 1983.

Although he supports prayer in school and the teaching of creationism along with evolution to explain the origins of humankind, Naylor rejects the label “New Right.” And it was the New Right Republicans in the Assembly who threatened to bring down his leadership before he stepped down last November and began investigating the possibility of winning a Senate candidacy.

In style, he is open and prone to to mull over publicly the pros and cons of an issue, a trait untested in the rapid-fire pressures of a statewide campaign but one he seems uninclined to change, as evidenced by the way he responded to a question about how federal revenue sharing is spent in California: “I’m not precisely sure and I should know that.”

Naylor has a blue-ribbon education--graduating from Stanford and earning a law degree from Yale. He served in the Army as an administrator for 11 months in Vietnam. He is a longtime party activist.

About Cranston, Naylor said: “Voters will be shocked when they learn how liberal his voting record is. He’s a welfare-state, blame-America liberal.”