At 30-Year Low, Democrats Face Tough Task to Regain Power

Considering that the Democratic Party had just reached a 30-year low in Orange County, John R. Hanna, county party chairman, sounded surprisingly upbeat the morning after Tuesday’s election.

For the first time since 1956, the Democrats had emerged from a general election with Republicans representing every legislative and congressional district that lie completely within the county.

Working on about two hours of sleep, Hanna, a 35-year-old Santa Ana lawyer, surveyed the damage and vowed not only to rebuild the local party structure, from its fund-raising apparatus to its Democratic clubs, but to give the Republicans stiff competition in 1988.

The Republicans came out of the election with the highest percentage of registered voters in the county in 54 years, with a 54.2%-to-35.6% edge over Democrats. And the Republicans won two central county seats, in the 38th Congressional District and the 72nd Assembly District, that state and national Democrats once had considered safe seats for their party.

In the 38th District, Republican incumbent Robert K. Dornan beat Democrat Richard Robinson decisively, and in the 72nd District Republican Richard E. Longshore defeated Democrat Dan E. Griset.

Still, Hanna was unfazed.

“We’re definitely looking to the next election,” he said earnestly. “We’re going to get that 72nd seat back. Dick Longshore will be hearing footsteps for the next two years. So will Bob Dornan.”

For all of Hanna’s enthusiasm, however, Orange County Republicans--and not a few Democrats--are skeptical about the county Democratic Party’s ability to buck the Republican tide and return to any semblance of power. It appears, indeed, to be a long road back.

For one thing, there is the enormity of the task of rebuilding the opposition party in a county so heavily Republican. County GOP Chairman Thomas A. Fuentes jokingly suggested Wednesday that maybe Orange County should secede from California and become the nation’s first all-Republican state.

Said Mark Baldassare, a local pollster and a UC Irvine professor of social ecology: “In Orange County, the Democrats really need to almost start all over again and build a new party. I think the Democrats here are confused about who they are.”

“I think there are some of the more traditional Democrats and then there are the new-wave Demos,” Baldassare said, referring to the younger party members, many from a local activist group called Democratic Associates. That group had backed its own candidate, political novice David Carter, in the 38th Congressional District primary against Robinson.

Attorney Mark S. Rosen, the Democratic candidate in the 71st Assembly District, ran square into some disagreement within his party when he asked some of the volunteers working on his campaign to spread the word that he was opposed to the confirmation of California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

Rosen said he knew he needed a law-and-order message to have a fighting chance against incumbent Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), but “all the unions and all the activists were very liberal and supported Rose Bird.” So when they telephoned voters about his candidacy they would not mention his opposition to her, Rosen said.

Hope Warschaw, a former staffer for the Democratic National Committee who ran Robinson’s campaign against Dornan, strongly criticized the county’s Democratic leaders for their lack of attention to the nuts and bolts of politics.

“The real problem with these grass-roots Democrats, these activist Democrats in Orange County, is that they hold parties with themselves. They go to cocktail parties with their closest friends and then say, ‘The party is fine.’

“They haven’t communicated with the mass electorate. They wouldn’t know how to do it even if they wanted to. They’ll do hit-or-miss programs in an election year, but that’s it. Meantime, the Republicans are out working their base all the time. They’re out on the streets year-round.”

Warschaw, who lives in Santa Monica, said the party’s young leadership never really backed Robinson after he beat Carter in the primary, apparently because they didn’t like him personally.

“But we all have to make compromises in our party,” she said. “It’s a big party. People down here (in Orange County) have to get away from personality contests and just back Democratic candidates, no matter who they are.”

“There seems to be little or no long-term consistency of their programs,” said Fuentes, the Republican Party chairman, of the opposition’s leaders. “They have been very high on hype and press releases and very low on elbow grease and organizational structure. I would counsel them to save the ditto machine ink and spend some time on finding decent candidates and walking precincts.”

Hanna, who has been chairman since July, insisted that the criticism from Warschaw and Fuentes was unfair.

‘A Lot of Elbow Grease’

“I’ll match the number of precincts I’ve walked (since 1968 in Orange County) with Tom Fuentes any day of the week,” Hanna said. “I think there has been a lot of elbow grease put in by the Democratic Party.”

As part of the effort to rebuild the Democratic Party in Orange County, Hanna cited a $55,000 voter registration drive that has raised Democratic voter registration a few percentage points in the central part of the county.

Though the gains were small, it was the first time that Democratic registration had gained in that area since 1978, he said.

“Big things come from small steps,” he said. “That’s my style.”

Hanna has his job cut out for him, however. As of last week, a countywide voter registration drive by Republicans that had continued steadily since the 1984 election netted the party an unprecedented margin of 203,000 registered voters over the Democrats.

Will Stress Fund-Raising

Looking to the future, Hanna said he will emphasize fund-raising and will expand an existing small-donor program through which Democrats contribute $5 to $25 to the party every month. The program now has 120 contributors but Hanna said he intends to have 1,000 by 1988.

“We haven’t had the same amount of money that the Republicans have been able to raise,” Hanna said. “And the key and critical component to a class operation is to have a well-funded operation. . . . The Republicans have done a good job of doing that. We haven’t raised enough money, and my goal is to do that.”

Hanna and other Democratic leaders cited the success of two activist groups: the Democratic Foundation of Orange County, a fund-raising group with 95 major donors who pay dues of $1,000 a year, and the Democratic Associates.

Members of the 2-year-old Democratic Associates, numbering about 500, pay $50 annual dues. Supporters of the group say it is bringing a new generation of young activists--previously apolitical young professionals--into the party.

For all the interest in the foundation as a source for major Democratic donors, some candidates and campaign managers contended that the financial support they received from it during this election was disappointing. Mike Balmages, the Orange County chairman for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s gubernatorial campaign, said he wrote letters to all 95 foundation members but received contributions from only four people. “There were a couple of people in the foundation who were very generous. But except for (those), it was pretty worthless,” Balmages said.

Hanna acknowledged Friday that he would like the foundation to be a stronger force in bankrolling Democratic campaigns.

Mary Yunt, executive secretary-treasurer of the Orange County AFL-CIO, said she believes that local party activists have lost touch with working men and women--a significant portion of the county’s registered Democrats. Unless the party becomes closer and more accessible to these voters, she said, the Republicans’ steady advances will continue.

“We have to get back to the grass roots with the party,” Yunt said. “I think we need more individualized contact with voters--we have to reach out to them more.

’ . . . for the High-Rollers’

“I don’t think we can do all of our fund-raising for the high-rollers,” she said. “You see a lot of party fund raising . . . where the money begins with $125-per-person contributions and then goes up to $1,000 per person and more. Well, working people cannot afford that--they can’t afford to go to those functions. They feel shut out of the system, but it’s those people who go out and vote.”

Yunt expressed optimism that the party could come back, recalling a time in the early 1970s when county Democrats held four Assembly seats, two state Senate districts and a congressional seat.

The difference, she said, was that “in those days there was a lot of grass-roots activity. There were a lot of (political) events that included working people, and we built on that.”

Hanna has worked in county politics for years, serving since 1974 on the state and local Democratic central committees and spending a year in Washington as a public information officer for former Rep. Jerry M. Patterson (D-Garden Grove).

He acknowledged that the rebuilding process his party faces in Orange County will take time, and that if the effort is to succeed there will have to be a strong Democratic candidate for president in 1988.

Ties With Unions, Minorities

Besides raising more money and conducting an ongoing voter registration drive, Hanna has vowed to strengthen the party’s traditional ties with labor unions and to reach minority groups. Already he has added an Asian, a Latino and a black to the party’s 48-member central committee.

Last month, the party took out a small advertisement in Westminster’s major Vietnamese newspaper, Nguoi Viet. Written in Vietnamese, the ad featured Democratic candidates Rosen, Griset, Robinson and state Senate candidate Francis Hoffman.

At the moment, Orange County’s 10-year-old Vietnamese community is overwhelmingly Republican in registration and there is an active Vietnamese-Republican club. But Hanna says it’s time for competition.

The Nguoi Viet ad was “a shot across the bow (of the Republican Party) by me,” Hanna said. “We’re not conceding the Vietnamese to the Republicans.”

Hanna paused when asked if he really believed he could reverse the Republican tide.

“I’m trying to be like Moses,” he said. “I may not get there . . but we’re coming back.”