Longshore, Griset Take Campaigns to the Streets

Santa Ana Mayor Dan Griset, the Democratic candidate running against Republican Richard E. Longshore for the open seat in the 72nd Assembly District, knocked at a red brick and green stucco house on Clementine Street in Anaheim.

“Hi, I’m Dan Griset, the mayor of Santa Ana, and I’m running for the Assembly. . . . You may have heard of me. . . . I’m the candidate who. . .”

Standing just inside the door, Sietske Boettger interrupted him: “Oh yes, you’re the man who sponsored that cleanup of the empty field around the corner. I was impressed. But please excuse me--my dinner is burning. . . .”

The next day, about 10 miles away on the other side of the district, Longshore approached Mark Klaess, who was standing in his front yard on Schooner Avenue in Garden Grove.

“I wish you could do something about traffic courts,” Klaess told Longshore. “You get parking tickets, and they won’t give you a trial. . . . I’ve got a bunch of them, and I’m not going to give them one red cent.”

It’s back to the basics in the 72nd Assembly District this election year, where the candidates are battling it out in the political trenches. Not since 1974, when Democrat Richard Robinson, an obscure union official, defeated Republican Marlin McKeever, a well-known former football star, has there been this much street-level precinct work in a state Assembly race in Orange County.

Griset, 42, has walked about 80 of the district’s 227 precincts; Longshore, 61, has walked about 50. In the remaining weeks of the 1986 campaign, they are being aided by armies of campaign workers. Every precinct has been walked by representatives from both campaigns at least once; some, three times. Professional campaign strategists say that by Nov. 4, Election Day, each voter in the 72nd Assembly District probably will have come into contact with the Griset-Longshore contest between 20 and 40 times, through a combination of precinct walks, phone calls, slick campaign mail, posters and even garage sales.

Both political parties are pouring money and political services into the race for the last legislative seat held by the Democrats in Orange County. Two years ago, Longshore--who is running in the district for the third time--came within 257 votes of defeating Robinson, who chose to run for Congress this year rather than seek reelection. Longshore has met some of the same voters face-to-face half a dozen times during the past six years.

Democrats’ Defense

Griset’s candidacy represents the Democrats’ goal-line defense in the district, which includes Stanton and parts of Anaheim, Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Westminster. Since only a third of the district’s voters live in Santa Ana, Griset has had to make a special effort to become known in other areas, such as central Anaheim, where the Boettgers live.

So it was that he interrupted their dinner preparations two weeks ago.

The aging sidewalks in the Boettgers’ neighborhood have been pushed up in some places by advancing tree roots. Fifty-year-old, wood-sided bungalows stand next to 20-year-old brick and stucco structures. Many original homeowners, who came here because this was serene suburbia, now are retired. The newcomers, more racially and economically mixed, have come for Orange County’s jobs.

After checking on her dinner, Sietske Boettger returned to the front door with her husband, Ben, to continue the conversation with Griset.

“I hope you’re not going to blame me for your dinner burning,” Griset joked.

“Oh no, I just lost track of the time,” Sietske Boettger said.

Supporting Griset

A few minutes later, Ben Boettger signed a Griset campaign document that resembled a petition, declaring his support for Griset’s “neighborhood pride” campaign. He also agreed to post a Griset campaign sign in his front yard--one of an unprecedented 8,000 lawn signs Griset said his campaign has distributed so far. The Boettgers--both Republicans--said they will vote for Griset.

Around the corner on Dickel Street, the reaction was the same when Griset explained to Wayne Ogden that “I know you’re Republican, but I’m the kind of Democrat who believes in the death penalty.”

“I just turned to the Republican Party a few years ago, but now I’m thinking about going back to the Democrats,” Ogden told Griset. “Even if I don’t, you’ll get our vote.”

But it was not the same at every house. One woman, busy knitting, refused to come to the door. Others simply listened to Griset and said they have not decided how they will vote.

Last month, as part of his “neighborhood pride” campaign, Griset joined campaign workers and neighborhood volunteers to clean up a vacant lot at the corner of Lemon and Water streets, about two blocks from the Boettgers and the Ogdens. He gave away plastic trash bags, red T-shirts imprinted with campaign logos and hot dogs to people who came to rake, mow and pull weeds.

Neighborhood Cleanups

Part of his strategy is to walk door to door in neighborhoods where he and his campaign workers have held cleanups.

But by the time he returned to the central Anaheim neighborhood where the Boettgers and the Ogdens live, a few beer cans and food wrappers had appeared in the vacant lot’s lush grass, which had grown tall again.

Voters in the area, interviewed several days after Griset’s precinct walk, recalled the cleanup effort with praise and seemed resigned about its short-term benefits. They only vaguely recalled Longshore, who had walked part of the same neighborhood--even those who remembered voting for the retired Navy supply officer and real estate broker two years ago.

For example, Lillian Brown, a widow who lives on Valencia Avenue, a few blocks east of the vacant lot that was cleaned up, said she voted for Longshore in 1984 and had been planning to do so again but now has changed her mind. “I think it’s great,” she said of the cleanup effort. “If more people did that instead of wasting money on those awful political ads, we would all be better off.”

Plans to Go Back

Longshore said of the Anaheim neighborhood where Griset seemed to have found support, “It’s probably a precinct that we haven’t gone back to a second time, but we will be there again by Election Day.”

Griset’s campaign staff finds potential cleanup sites by driving around and taking notes. “We’ve had to give up several promising locations because they were a block over the line in another district,” said Griset campaign coordinator Gale Kaufman, who is on loan from the Assembly Democratic Caucus in Sacramento. “Some are too big. We try to get those that can be done in an hour or two.”

Griset said the concept came out of his initial precinct walking last spring: “People seemed to be frustrated about their neighborhoods and wanted someone to do something positive about it. Nobody could put their finger on it, exactly, but I sensed their frustration and feel it myself.”

It was about 4:30 p.m. when Longshore arrived at his campaign headquarters on the second floor of a new commercial building in a mini-mall filled with Vietnamese markets, shops and restaurants at the corner of Bolsa Avenue and Ward Streets in Garden Grove. He had spent the morning at home, at a desk in his garage, where he manages the fund-raising part of his campaign and solicits contributions by phone.

The headquarters office, however, is the command post for the war being fought in the precincts. On the wall is a large map, dotted with colored pins showing which precincts have been walked and how many times. The pins show that a large section of south Garden Grove and west Santa Ana has been walked two or three times, and that there have been several neighborhood coffees there.

In 1984, Santa Ana was the only city in the district Longshore failed to carry in his unsuccessful race against Robinson.

On this particular afternoon, a Longshore campaign aide handed the Republican candidate a list of addresses in the precinct across the street from the mini-mall. The precincts to be walked are selected, in part, by strategists that include Assemblyman John R. Lewis (R-Orange), who oversees election efforts of the Assembly Republican Caucus in Sacramento, and his district administrative assistant, Maureen Werft, who is on a leave of absence from her state-paid post.

“Who’s walking with me today?” Longshore asked.

One of the volunteers was 30 minutes late, but at 5 p.m. Longshore finally drove him far into the targeted neighborhood in the candidate’s rusty, faded blue Cadillac and then returned alone to the corner of Ward Street and Stern Avenue.

The two- and three-bedroom, ranch-style houses here were built in the 1960s. Registration lists show there are 292 Democrats and 276 Republicans in the precinct. Democrats have a similar edge districtwide but traditionally vote in fewer numbers than do Republicans.

Needs to Get Vote Out

“If I can get my vote out to the polls, I’ll win,” Longshore said as he approached the first house on Stern.

“Hi. I’m Dick Longshore,” the candidate told the woman who opened the door. “I thought I’d come by and get acquainted.”

“Fine, but is it going to rain?” the woman asked as she scanned the gray sky.

Down the street a man wanted to talk about President Reagan. “The President is doing a good job, and I think we should support him,” the man said.

Longshore explained that state legislators do not deal much with federal issues such as foreign policy, but left the man with a brochure and said, “I’d like to be the guy to help President Reagan in Sacramento.”

Later, Longshore approached Tom McAffee, who was in his front yard. “I don’t know who you are or anything about you,” McAffee said.

“Well, I’m against (California Chief Justice) Rose (Elizabeth) Bird,” Longshore replied.

“That sounds good to me--I’m glad to hear it,” McAffee said.

At one house, Longshore approached two young men who were about to leave.

“You won’t get any wishy-washy answers out of me,” Longshore told them. “I say exactly what’s on my mind, and I give it to you straight. I hope I can count on your vote on election day.”

“You’ve got it just for coming here,” said one of the men. “So many of them don’t even bother.”

‘Personal Touch’

Beaming, Longshore strutted toward the next house. “That was the personal touch,” he said. “It really works.”

A few days later, an informal telephone survey of the area indicated Longshore had impressed many voters. But most also said they had not decided how they would vote.

“I thought he was here before and had given out the same piece of literature,” Mae Richardson said. “I’m undecided.”

Eileen Moore recalled voting for Longshore two years ago but said she was now leaning toward Griset, who had walked the same neighborhood two months earlier.

Griset had staged no cleanup effort near Stern or Schooner avenues, but Moore said Griset had spent half an hour talking to her in her living room, and she had found him “very knowledgeable about the crime problem and the problem with drugs.”

“I talked at great length with Mr. Griset,” Moore said. “And now I’m up in the air as to how I’ll vote. . . .I just feel like something needs to be done about the drugs in this neighborhood, but nobody seems willing to do anything about it.”

Moore also voiced a doubt echoed by other voters interviewed:

“Both candidates sound good, don’t they? You just never know what they’re going to do until they’re already in office.”