Democrats Urge Earlier Primary Vote on President

Hoping to give California a greater voice in selecting the next presidential candidate, California Democratic leaders Saturday recommended moving the 1988 primary election from June to early March or April.

Sixteen other states are planning to hold their primaries on “Super Tuesday,” March 8, 1988. So if California waits until June, after Super Tuesday and after another 19 states have held primaries, voters will be selecting a presidential nominee after the fact, state party chairwoman Betty Smith said.

Also at Saturday’s meeting of Democratic executive board members in Anaheim, Secretary of State March Fong Eu warned that in California “Democratic registration has skidded to a 52-year low.” Not since 1934 have Democrats had so few registered voters, “a very pitiful 51.2%,” she said.

If the party does not become more aggressive at registering voters, “Democrats are going to lose from the top to the bottom of the ticket” this November, said Eu, who is running for reelection and said she was worried that her Republican challenger, Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, might beat her.

The issue of moving California’s primary has been debated for at least four years, with Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno) offering legislation several times to change the date. As in years past, California Republican leaders are cool to the idea.

“We don’t see anything wrong with being the last big primary,” state Republican Party Executive Director Jack Harriman said Friday. “The huge number of delegates from both parties for California is quite a prize at the end of a closely run bunch of primaries.”

‘Not That Interested’

Harriman said leading Republicans, including party chairman Clair Burgener and Gov. George Deukmejian, are “not that interested” in changing the date. But Democratic activists noted that although California Democrats regularly send more delegates to a nominating convention than any other state, they have not swung a presidential nomination since 1972.

In a resolution approved unanimously Saturday, members of the state party’s executive board asked the Legislature to move California’s primary either to March 8, the so-called Super Tuesday; to March 15, the date for the Illinois primary and the proposed date for Ohio’s primary, or to April 12, the election date for general law cities in California.

Alice Travis, a Democratic Party executive board member from Los Angeles, predicted that as 1988 draws near, California Republicans would share the Democrats’ desire “to be a player nationally” in electoral politics.

Still, Travis mourned the passing of a more deliberate primary process in which, with primaries strung out for several months, candidates have time to hone their campaigns and voters time to study them.

She added: “If no one’s going to put a hold on this rush to judgment, we ought to be part of it. If we’re creating a monster, we ought to be an arm of the monster.”

Resolution on AIDS

Board members also unanimously adopted a resolution opposing mandatory testing for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and condemning those who have seized on the AIDS epidemic “to advance their program of homophobia.”

The resolution did not mention by name an initiative placed on the November ballot by followers of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche that would require mandatory testing for AIDS and would permit its victims to be quarantined. But earlier Saturday, Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp attacked the initiative calling it “loathsome” and “one of the most blatant appeals to public ignorance that I have seen.”