ELECTIONS ’88 : ORANGE COUNTY : Rohrabacher Says Undecideds Secured His Upset of Wieder

Dana Rohrabacher had two people to thank when he woke up Wednesday morning as the surprise Republican nominee in the conservative 42nd Congressional District: his former boss, President Reagan, and a friend from the White House, retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North.

The former employed him as a speech writer for 7 1/2 years, providing him with an acknowledgement letter and an album of White House pictures that proved an effective basis for Rohrabacher’s efforts to reach GOP voters through the mail.

As for North, Rohrabacher’s modestly financed campaign could never have afforded to pay for the kind of TV and newspaper publicity that the major figure in the Iran-Contra scandal provided when he spent a day last week campaigning for a man North called “a close personal friend.”

In a series of events, North also raised about $100,000 to add to Rohrabacher’s campaign war chest just in time to pay for several last-minute mailers that delivered his conservative message in the district, which is split between Orange and Los Angeles counties and includes some of the most staunchly Republican areas in the country.

“I think I was losing until then,” Rohrabacher, 40, said of North’s appearance. Speaking just hours after he overcame his two major opponents--Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, 67, and Stephen Horn, 57, a former Cal State Long Beach president--to capture the nomination, Rohrabacher said, “There were a lot of undecided people who were looking for a candidate.”

Rohrabacher collected 26,673, or 35%, of the votes, to Wieder’s 16,659, or 21.9%, in a district where the Republican nominee traditionally goes on to win easily in the general election.

Horn received 15,486, or 20.3%, and a fourth candidate in a field of eight Republicans, former White House advance man Andrew Littlefair of Torrance, barely registered on the scale with 6,422 votes, or 8.4%. The four remaining candidates received less than 6% each.

In the three-way Democratic primary, Huntington Beach resident and political science instructor Guy C. Kimbrough won with 47.9% of the vote in final, unofficial tallies. Ada Unruh of Torrance was second runner-up, claiming 40.3% of the vote, and Dan Farrell trailed a distant third with 17.1% of the vote.

Peace and Freedom Party candidate Richard D. Rose ran unopposed.

The seat became open when Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach), the state treasurer-designate, announced that he would retire to pursue his fight to be confirmed. Lungren had endorsed Wieder.

To the surprise of many, Rohrabacher easily beat Wieder in her Orange County home turf by a 34.1% to 28.8% margin. Given that, it is surprising to remember that when Wieder entered the district’s Republican primary, she and her opponents agreed that the race was hers to lose.

Polling from all camps indicated Wieder’s name identification was strongest, and she was generally thought to have a decided edge in the Orange County portion of the district, while holding her own in Los Angeles County.

But Wieder was attacked by slow-growth advocates, who began a recall campaign against her during the campaign in reaction to votes she cast as a supervisor for developer agreements.

More seriously, she made a “goof,” as she called it at one point. A “routine check” of Wieder’s background by Rohrabacher revealed that she did not have a college degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, as she had claimed for 25 years.

Wieder admitted at one point that the mistake had persisted for so long that “I believed it--I must have,” raising questions of her credibility.

She apologized to voters, saying she had “made a mistake . . . a big one,” but her campaign never recovered.

Horn also had problems. While he began second only to Wieder in name identification, polls by his campaign and other candidates’ polls showed that some of the recognition is negative. Horn had been forced to resign from Cal State Long Beach amid budgetary problems and low faculty morale.

Huge Bulk of Undecideds

As the candidates moved into the final days, political consultants involved in the race noticed an unusual phenomenon: a huge bulk of undecided votes.

“I’ve been through eight election cycles and been involved in over 90 campaigns, and I’ve never seen the undecided as high as this the day before the election,” said Tony Marsh, political consultant to Wieder.

Marsh said informal polling indicated that at that point, up to 75% of the registered Republicans in the Los Angeles County portion of the district were undecided. The figure was 50% in Orange County, much higher than the race in the neighboring 40th Congressional District. That put Rohrabacher in a position to benefit.

Rohrabacher’s political consultant, Allan Hoffenblum, attributed Rohrabacher’s victory to “two things: President Reagan, and everybody else left him (Rohrabacher) alone.”

Hoffenblum said he developed Rohrabacher’s campaign theme, “A Reagan Republican for Congress,” the first time Rohrabacher came into his office with a letter from Reagan.

“We moved in with that message . . . while all the other candidates were attacking each other,” Hoffenblum said. “Then we had Ollie come in, and Ollie just consummated it.”

Arnold Steinberg, a Republican political consultant and friend of Rohrabacher’s, said North’s appearance “had the effect, with his (Rohrabacher’s) late mail, of having him peak at just the right time.”

Horn, drinking a Diet Pepsi as he performed a post-mortem on the race after midnight Tuesday in his Long Beach headquarters, said Rohrabacher’s last mailing knocked out his defenses and those of Wieder.

“Their strategy was a good one,” Horn said. “Bringing in Oliver North galvanized attention. Their last two pieces, especially the letter from the President, seemed to have an effect on some voters.”

Though he had had little sleep, Rohrabacher was neatly dressed Wednesday morning in a dark blue suit and his red “Adam Smith tie,” which he said was worn by him and other “true-blue Reaganites” in the White House in tribute to the economist he called “the father of capitalism.” There was debris around from the victory party at the Doubletree Hotel in Orange the night before.

Among other things, Rohrabacher announced a new resolve: to get to know the people who will probably be his constituents: “I’ve been away from home, fighting the good fight, I believe. . . . But now is the time I’ve got to get reacquainted with these individuals.”

Rohrabacher said that, if elected in November, he would like to begin his congressional career on a House committee dealing with science and technology. Later, he said, he would like a seat on a committee dealing with foreign intelligence.

As for Wieder, it was business as usual. She attended a regular Board of Supervisors meeting at 9 a.m. Wednesday, where she issued a statement in which she congratulated Rohrabacher.

“I’ve been asked any number of times why I decided to run for Congress,” she said in the statement. “In fact, there have been a few occasions on which I’ve asked myself the same question!”

‘Very Real Human Concerns’

She added, on a more serious note, that she had hoped to deal with “very real human concerns” such as crime, taxes and education.

Wieder was otherwise unavailable to the press Wednesday.

Hours earlier, she was among the Republicans at the Doubletree watching the final returns trickle in. At 2:10 a.m., a disappointed Wieder pulled herself together and called Rohrabacher--whom she had dismissed during the campaign as a “pencil-pusher” for the President--in his third-floor suite a few doors down from hers. According to Rohrabacher, he met with Wieder after she invited him down for a chat with her and her husband, Irv.

Though he had been the one to, as he put it, “stumble across” Wieder’s college lie, Rohrabacher said he had not beaten it “into the ground” as other candidates had. He said he admired her composure, courage and energy.

“All of this time, I’ve told people I thought Harriett really had a lot of guts,” Rohrabacher said. “Last night, she had a great deal of grace and class as well.”