Democratic Erosion : State Voters Make a Shift to the Right

There is a realignment taking place across the landscape of California politics that is changing the route most candidates must travel to statewide elective office.

And despite the dramatic influx of Latino and Asian immigrants in recent years, it is a shifting of whites--politically, geographically and occupationally--that is having the biggest impact.

It has been a gradual, gentle upheaval that, for the present at least, is tilting the political landscape toward the right, resulting in a substantial erosion of loyalty to the Democratic Party. While far from earthquake magnitude, the movement appears to be deep-rooted and, to a large degree, independent of the so-called “Reagan Revolution.” It also is subtly different, with a distinct environmental and sometimes bipartisan hue that often is shaded by local issues.

High-Growth Areas

As the Nov. 4 election nears, the realigning can be seen particularly in areas bubbling with new population--in southern Ventura County, around Simi Valley; in communities northeast of San Francisco Bay, and in the historic Mother Lode region of the Sierra foothills.

In the long term, as California enters the next century, it is the rapid rise in Latino and Asian populations that holds the greatest potential for altering the political landscape. Demographers frequently note that minorities in the year 2010 will comprise more than half the state’s population.

But for the moment, newly arrived Latino and Asian immigrants are having only a minimal impact on statewide politics because--due partly to their cultural background of not having participated in the democratic process, and the fact many are not yet U.S. citizens--they vote much less frequently than do whites and blacks.

All of these groups--blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians--are part of a long story of change in California. The shifts of recent years in voter attitudes and loyalties were detected and measured during scores of Times interviews with political professionals, public opinion pollsters and university professors, using extensive computer studies of the state’s voting patterns and demography.

Analyzing the Electorate

As the political landscape changes, so do the techniques for analyzing and manipulating it and the language used to describe it.

Political professionals who advise statewide candidates no longer think of California solely in terms of the artificial boundaries of cities and counties. Because most political messages are delivered to the voters by television commercials--and this has been increasingly the case during the current election campaigns--strategists concentrate on TV “ADIs,” or areas of dominant influence.

It is not so much California’s 58 counties--each with its own local pride, traditions and voting history--but the state’s 11 television ADI marketing areas that matter most now when the political gurus sit down to allocate a candidate’s time and financial resources. Affluent, eccentric Marin County has been reduced to just another part of the San Francisco ADI.

“California has 13 million voters scattered over 1,000 miles of landscape, and we’re sitting in the middle of the best communications setup in the world,” noted Republican political consultant Bill Roberts, a veteran practitioner of virtually every vote-gathering technique developed in the past 30 years. “Today, TV owns 75% of the gubernatorial and senatorial election processes--and 100% of the presidential.”

The road signs along the landscape also are changing. The new language of TV and radio “media buyers,” as well as the designers of increasingly sophisticated political “target mail,” refines in more precise detail such traditional neighborhood descriptions as “blue collar” and “upper class.” Blue-collar workers now live in a variety of neighborhoods, with such characterizations as “Blue-Chip Blues” and “Shotguns and Pickups.” The upper class is spread through such neighborhoods as “Furs and Station Wagons” and “Pools and Patios.”

TV viewing habits are of crucial concern to a campaign manager responsible for spending millions of dollars on advertising. An upscale “Furs and Station Wagons” couple, for instance, is more likely to watch “St. Elsewhere” than “Dallas.” But buying into “Dallas” likely will deliver the the candidate’s message to many “Blue-Chip Blues” voters. Sophisticated demographic and marketing analysis has become the essential tool of any high-stakes political campaign. “I used to do it with colored pencils and overlays. Now I do it with computers,” observed Stuart K. Spencer, a one-time partner of Roberts and perhaps the most successful of California’s many political consultants over the last three decades. “I used to understand the overlays. I don’t understand the computers.”

But it is the proliferation of computers that has made possible all the new high-tech analysis and campaigning methods and permitted politicians to clearly understand and capitalize on voting whims and to fathom more fundamental political shifts.

Understanding the California voter long has been considered a challenge by campaign consultants and political observers--and occasionally regarded as beyond comprehension, an insoluble mystery. But the mystery really is mainly myth, and the portrait of the California electorate can be seen easily when the pieces of the puzzle are brought together with the help of new technology.

For one thing, voters in this state have become increasingly independent and bipartisan and are saying to the politicians, “A pox on both your parties.”

During most of the 1960s, only around 3% of the voters were registered as “declined to state” or as members of some minor party. But starting in 1968--the year angry resentment of the Vietnam War pulled liberals away from the Democratic Party and American Independent presidential candidate George Wallace attracted blue-collar conservatives--more and more Californians began shucking normal party ties. By the 1980s, the percentage of “declined to state” and minor party voters had risen to around 12%.

Concentration of Independents

The urban county with the biggest concentration of independents during the 1984 presidential election was traditionally Democratic San Francisco, where nearly 17% of the voters registered in neither of the major parties. San Diego was up over 14%, as were Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. More than 19% of the voters in small but rapidly growing mountainous Alpine and Mono counties registered independently of the major parties.

Perhaps more revealing, 24% of the California voters surveyed by The Los Angeles Times Poll after casting ballots in the 1984 presidential election said they really considered themselves to be independents. And they voted by a nearly 2 1/2-1 ratio for Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter F. Mondale.

Recent Times polls have found “decline to state” voters spread all over the demographic spectrum. But there is a tendency for them to be a little more middle-of-the-road politically than the average and also younger.

Defections from the Democratic Party have been dramatic in some regions of the state, but overall there was only about a 5 1/2-point drop--from 57.5% to 52%--between the 1960 and 1984 presidential elections, most of it commencing with Reagan’s 1980 race against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter. (Registration figures for this year’s general election have not been reported by the secretary of state.)

The story is different for the Republican Party. GOP registration in California fell by about 4 1/2 points, from 39.2% to 34.8%, between the 1960 and 1976 elections, two years after Republican Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace over the Watergate scandals. Since then, helped by Reagan, the party’s registration has been inching steadly upward and in 1984 it was at 36.5%, still about three points under the 1960 mark.

But, again, perhaps more telling were the responses of California voters in 1984 when the Times Poll asked them what they actually considered themselves to be politically. Only 43% said Democrat and even fewer, 33%, replied Republican.

It is a fact of political life, however, that Republicans are more loyal to their party than Democrats are to theirs--otherwise, the GOP never would be able to elect candidates running on a statewide ballot.

Caltech political science professor Bruce E. Cain calculated that during the California elections between 1960 and 1984, Democrats running statewide averaged nearly 50% of the vote and Republicans got slightly more than 47%. This meant that the Democratic share of the vote was six points fewer than the party’s registration, but the GOP exceeded its registration by 10 points.

Democratic Disloyalty

In recent elections, the biggest pockets of Democratic disloyalty, coupled with Republican loyalty, have been in the rural areas--in the Central Valley counties of Glenn, Madera, Merced, Kern, Kings, Sutter and Tulare; in the mountain counties of Amador and Modoc, and down in Imperial. Also, Republicans have demonstrated above-average loyalty in Butte, El Dorado, Fresno, Inyo, Lassen, Mono, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Solano, Tehama, Tuolumne and Yuba counties.

“There’s one story here: California has gone to hell for Democrats,” commented Michael Berman, a Democratic campaign consultant based on Los Angeles’ Westside. “Young people are registering Republican. And from what they’ve had to choose--between Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale or Ronald Reagan--it’s not been a tough choice.”

But his partner, Carl D’Agostino, quickly added: “If California had a real fine Democratic candidate for President, California would become a fine state for Democrats again.”

The political landscape of youth, indeed, is changing.

Surveys by the Times Poll have found that young California voters are registering as Republicans in far greater numbers than they did in the 1960s and ‘70s. In fact, the average Republican today is slightly younger than the average Democrat, reversing a long trend.

Two Times surveys taken eight years apart--the first in September, 1978, as that years’s gubernatorial campaign was warming up and the other last month at a similar point in the electoral process--showed:

- Voters under age 30 today are split almost evenly between the Democratic and Republican parties. Eight years ago, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 2 to 1 in this age group.

- Roughly one in five Republicans today is under age 30. Eight years ago, one in six was.

- Today, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 2 among voters aged 30-44, by 4 to 3 among voters aged 45-64, and by about 2 to 1 among those age 65 and over. Eight years ago, Democrats had a slightly better advantage than they do today among the 30-to-44 age group, but were a little worse off with people older than that. What all this boils down to is that Democrats in California are dying off faster than Republicans.

But although Californians are edging toward the right, they are to the left of the rest of the country on many questions of public policy, including so-called social issues. A nationwide survey by the Times Poll in July found that Californians, compared to other Americans, are:

- More concerned about hunger and poverty and the threat of war, and less concerned about taxes.

- More in favor of “affirmative action for blacks and other minorities.”

- More inclined to think that government should spend less money for national defense, but more supportive of increased spending for domestic programs.

- Less likely to watch TV preachers, or to vote for a political candidate who describes himself as an evangelical Christian.

- More likely to oppose federal aid to parochial schools, and less supportive of prayers in public schools.

- More likely to believe that “homosexual relations between consenting adults in the privacy of their homes should be legal.”

- And more annoyed when government “intrudes into the private lives of citizens.”

Alan Heslop, a former GOP activist who now heads the Rose Institute, a political research group at Claremont-McKenna College, said that although many new voters may be registering Republican, “they don’t feel a very powerful identity with the party. It’s a weak affiliation.”

Clint Reilly, a San Francisco-based Democratic consultant who is an ardent practitioner of high-tech research, said he even is beginning to harbor faint hopes of pulling young, college-educated entrepreneurs into his party.

‘Siege Mentality’

“That kind of Republican may--MAY--be opening up again to the Democratic Party after being closed off for six years,” Reilly said. “They’ve gone through this period of, ‘I’m a Republican; I’m voting Republican,’ which may have been sort of a reaction to Democratic dominance in American politics for 50 years--you know, the siege mentality.”

But conservative Republican state Sen. H. L. Richardson of Glendora, one of the state’s most successful political “target mail” entrepreneurs, said of the people he calls “the young Yuppie crowd: A movement they ain’t, but they are numbers. And I’m happy they’re becoming Republicans.”

Certain regional differences have become more prominent recently on the political landscape.

More than a struggle between parties, some strategists and academics say the state politically is realigning into a battleground between California’s long coastal strip and its vast inland regions. Caltech’s Cain said, “It is not so much a Democratic-Republican, conservative-liberal split in California as it is geopolitical: coast versus interior.”

This is clearly illustrated by a large map of California pinned to an office wall of Gov. George Deukmejian’s campaign manager, Larry Thomas. Big blue dots have been placed in the counties carried by Deukmejian in the 1982 gubernatorial election. Those won by his Democratic opponent, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, have red dots.

Most of Bradley’s red dots are in coastal counties. Few of Deukmejian’s blue dots are, though he did carry San Diego, Orange, Ventura and San Luis Obispo. Bradley’s red dots are hardly anywhere to be found in the interior. The only exceptions are little San Benito, where 46% of the population is Latino, and Yolo, dominated by the University of California campus at Davis.

It was an east-west split that dominated the 1982 gubernatorial campaign, not the traditional north-south division that strategists for generations have planned around.

The cutting issues that tend to divide the coast from the interior in California revolve around the environment. These are matters that sometimes also separate coastal Republicans from national Republicans and the Reagan agenda.

“Along the coast, even in Republican areas, Democratic candidates can win because of the environmental thing,” said Caltech’s Cain, a veteran demographer and surveyor of public opinion.

The environmental movement has been reborn on the California coast, after having burst into the public consciousness in the late 1960s and ‘70s, and then faded. It was revived as smog and traffic afflicted the far-out suburbs and science greatly improved its ability to measure the presence of dangerous chemicals.

Slow-Growth Movements

Bipartisan slow-growth movements have sprung up, for instance, in the Republican suburbs of San Diego County and the Simi Valley, where environmentalists of both parties often battle side-by-side.

“In your more wealthy neighborhoods--Rancho Santa Fe, Del Mar Heights--people are all of the opinion that there’s been too much growth taking place in Southern California. When they moved here from Los Angeles, they were trying to get away from that,” said San Diego City Councilman Bill Cleator, a politically conservative former furniture manufacturer who has run twice for mayor and lost to candidates with more pronounced pro-environment images.

“There are a lot of conservative Republicans who are not going to change their overall political views, but as far as local politics are concerned, they’re standing up and voicing their concerns about growth,” Cleator added.

County Supervisor Susan Golding was regarded as a pro-growth member of the San Diego City Council in the early 1980s, but since then she has had a change of heart. “You reach a level of tolerance for growth,” she explained. “There is a line that is crossed when the quality of life is affected. I feel that real honest growth management is something the people of San Diego want.”

What is so interesting politically about the slow-growth movement in San Diego County is that this area long has been a bastion of Republicanism--and it is even more so today--but the new Republicanism has room within it for many of the pro-environment causes once pushed almost exclusively by liberal Democrats.

The same realignment can be seen to the north in Simi Valley, the once-isolated, now burgeoning, home for more people than lived in all of Ventura County just 40 years ago.

Louis Pandolfi of Simi Valley, a Republican activist and head of a geological research firm, is an immigrant from the San Fernando Valley who now is leader of a slow-growth initiative campaign. “The smog was terrible, and I had asthma as a baby. We were commuting to Santa Monica,” Pandolfi recalled. “We finally said, ‘Let’s move out.’ Then about two years ago, the growth rate and the traffic began to bug us here, too.”

Environmental Factor

Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino Jr. (R-Ventura) observed: “When I first started running for partisan political office in Ventura in 1961, the environment was not a big factor. It is now. And a lot of environmentalists are active Republicans, too.” Asked what changed people’s attitudes, the congressman replied: “A general upgrading of the whole area. It used to be pretty much a working man’s place, and when people are concerned about making a living, they’re not as concerned about other things.”

Ventura County is a perfect example of the shifts in California politics. Once dominated by the oil and agriculture industries, it increasingly has become home for upper-middle-class, white-collar and service industry types. Settling in the fast-growing subdivisions of Simi Valley, Moorpark, Camarillo and Thousand Oaks, the newcomers have helped to make the GOP the majority party in the county. Only 25 years ago, it was more than 3-2 Democratic.

But few areas have changed more dramatically, and with such gloomy portent for Democrats, as that huge stretch of interior California encompassing the Central Valley and the Sierra Mother Lode.

“When I grew up 20 years ago, Redding had a very high Democratic registration, primarily Roosevelt Democrats,” said Franklin Cibula, former Shasta County Democratic chairman who is running for the state Senate. “There was a large group of people who had come to the area to build public projects, heavily union and very inclined to vote in the more liberal or Democratic tradition. Since then, there have been large migrations from Southern California, from areas that tend to be more Republican.

“Twenty years ago, almost all the officeholders up here were Democrats. Now, almost all are Republicans.”

In Butte County, site of huge Oroville Dam, built under the Democratic Administration of Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Democratic registration dropped as the dam rose and was completed and construction workers left for other jobs.

To the south, in the Sierra foothills hamlet of Sutter Creek, Amador County Democratic Chairman Sean Crowder observed: “People here, although mainly Democrats, are generally conservative. Some would call it redneck. . . . I feel like a little fish in an ocean being buffeted around. I’m a liberal.”

Just 25 years ago, old gold towns like Calaveras, Placerville and Nevada City were sleepy hollows inhabited by small numbers of conservative Democrats who would support the party if the candidate was not too left wing and if he would share a drink with leaders of the local chapter of E Clampus Vitus, a fun-loving lodge formed in mining days. Now, these pine-studded hills are beginning to fill up with middle-class refugees from urban life, seeking a rural atmosphere and offering opportunity to Republican candidates.

Down in Sacramento, a city once safe for Democratic candidates now is surrounded by Republican-leaning suburbs, perhaps previewing what eventually will happen in the Sierra foothills. Democratic ranks have dropped by six points in California’s capital county in the past 25 years, while “independent” registration has risen by nine points. Republicans Deukmejian and U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson both won here by comfortable margins in 1982.

‘Flow Is Ronald Reagan’

“What these people want is a good, steady job and to have a good time. Politically, they go with the flow, and right now the flow is Ronald Reagan,” said Sacramento-based Democratic consultant David Townsend, referring to the rapidly growing nearby suburbs. “There is no social conscience.”

The story is similar in the Fresno area, which--like Sacramento--was so firmly in the Democratic column in 1970 that Gov. Reagan lost there to Democrat Jesse M. Unruh while winning reelection. But Democratic registration has fallen 10 points in 25 years, and both Deukmejian and Wilson carried Fresno County in 1982.

At the bottom of the Central Valley, the Democratic registration advantage in Kern County has dropped from 2 to 1 to just a little better than 5 to 4 in the past quarter-century. “We have in Kern County only two elected Democrats--a state senator (Walter W. Stiern) who is retiring and the coroner, which is a nonpartisan office,” lamented Democratic Chairwoman Eleanor Akers.

The great aberration of California politics is the San Francisco Bay Area, reliably enough Democratic so that Bradley’s current gubernatorial campaign manager, Bob Thomson, calls it “our Orange County.”

But even the Bay Area is not entirely immune from the political realigning. Across the Bay from San Francisco, on the eastern side of the Oakland-Berkeley hills, Democratic registration has dropped by eight points in Contra Costa County during the past 25 years. In Santa Clara County, at the base of the San Francisco Peninsula, it has dropped nearly five points in 10 years--a seemingly small but still politically significant decline when elections are decided. Democratic registrations also have fallen off slightly in affluent San Mateo and Marin counties, and even San Francisco.

Throughout all this changing political landscape, however--as coastal voters become more environmentally conscious, the interior becomes more conservative and the entire state becomes more bipartisan--there also seems to be increasing apathy. Substantial numbers of California adults are failing to register and vote--43% in the 1984 presidential election and 51% in gubernatorial election four years ago. And the size of this non-voting group slowly has been on the rise over the past 30 years, according to the California secretary of state.

“We talk about a two-tier society economically. There’s increasingly a two-tier society politically: the participants and the non-participants,” observed veteran pollster Mervin Field.

The Times Poll found that people who do not register to vote tend to be considerably younger and less educated than the average California adult. There also is a disproportionately high percentage of Latinos among the unregistered. In fact, three in 10 of all unregistered Californians are Latinos, roughly double their share of the overall population.

Conflicting Theories

Field noted there are conflicting theories about why growing numbers of people are not voting, nationally as well as in California.

“On one hand, low participation can be interpreted as a symptom of citizen alienation from the political system, suspicion of politicians and pessimism about the consequences of political activity,” Field has written. “Another school of thought views low political participation as a demonstration of citizen optimism and contentment, confidence in the belief that no matter who wins the election, the city, state and nation will still proceed on a steady course and thus voting is not that important.”

But obviously, voting is important to candidates and campaign managers, and in the next two weeks they will be spending millions of dollars in frantic efforts to get Californians to the polls on Nov. 4. Most of their money and attention will be focused on highly expensive television advertising.

The political consultants and TV advertising experts who devise and send messages to voters rely on highly sophisticated high-tech marketing analysis, seasoned with old-fashioned gut instinct. “Time buyers” work with political advisers to target audiences most favorable to a candidate, separating the viewers into socioeconomic categories.

“If there’s a No. 1-ranked show for swing voters, that’s what we get into,” said Chuck Mycoff, vice president of Focus Media, a Studio City firm that buys commercials for Bradley and Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston.

A candidate trying to reach an upscale audience, according to Focus Media, is most likely to find those viewers tuned in to “The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties,” “Cheers,” “Miami Vice” and “Night Court.” For viewers on the lower end of the economic scale, the favorites are “227,” “The ABC Sunday Night Movie,” “Hunter,” “The Disney Sunday Movie” and “Silver Spoons.”

The Los Angeles ADI (TV area of dominant influence) is an economically efficient market in which to beam political commercials, but highly expensive. Because more than 40% of the state’s population lives in the Los Angeles viewing area, it costs only $10.80 to reach 1,000 adults. But a 30-second commercial on “The Cosby Show,” for example, runs $30,000. In San Francisco, where it costs $14.56 to reach 1,000 adults, the Cosby commercial goes for $16,000.

The most expensive ADI in the state, per 1,000 viewers, is San Diego at $34.63.

Often television commercials are not enough. Targeted mail directs advertising to even more specific groups. But so expensive is this process--perhaps 30 cents per potential voter, or $300 per 1,000--that it normally is used for congressional, legislative and local races, rather than in statewide contests.

In high-tech political mailing, consultants combine computer tapes of registration rolls, voting histories, the census and other pertinent information into a master tape that addresses and sorts brochures directed at precise types of voters. People are sorted by age, by sex, by race. Dictionaries of last names are used to distinguish ethnic voters.

Consultant Reilly noted: “If someone has Ms. on her name, that says something about attitudes, right? If there is a Mr. and Mrs., we figure it is somebody 50 years old. If a woman is single and 60 and describes herself as Miss, she may be a little prissy and not susceptible to some types of advertising.”

Pollster Field contends that a lot of the TV commercials and other political gimmickry have been responsible for turning off citizens and actually discouraging them from voting.

“We used to have grass-roots campaigning and ground-level activity by citizens that acted as a stimulus to voting” he said. “Now everything is dumped into TV and slick targeted mail--superficial slogans just geared to the highly motivated voters, often unseen and unseemly. Politicians pay less heed to the public because fewer people are participating. There is not any fire at the end of a campaign.

“Campaigning has become a very big business, and it is less of a citizen involvement process. The Hiram Johnsons, Thomas Jeffersons and ‘small-r’ republicans are probably turning over in their graves.”

Assisting with research for this story were Susan Pinkus of The Times Poll, Douglas Conner of The Times library, Times staff writers Stephanie O’Neill and Tillie Fong and Cecilia Rasmussen of the Times City-County Bureau.