Democratic Chief Backs Earlier Calif. Primary

Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown on Friday endorsed the campaign to move up the date of the 1992 California presidential primary.

“It is a good idea. I look on it favorably,” Brown said at a breakfast meeting with Southern California reporters.

California votes at the tail end of the primary election season, and not since 1972 has it played a truly pivotal role in the outcome of a contested primary. In 1988, the state and its concerns had become all but irrelevant in the primary campaigns. The nominees were already determined by the time Californians went to the polls, and there was hardly any debate over matters of particular interest to the state--everything from immigration to federal water projects.

Local leaders of both parties came away from that perfunctory June primary vote expressing alarm about just how unfamiliar George Bush and Michael Dukakis were with the geography and political cross-currents of California.

Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, who previously opposed any rescheduling of the primary, suddenly changed course after the 1988 primary and said the state needed to strengthen its hand.

Now pending in the state Assembly Ways and Means Committee is bipartisan legislation to position California in the thick of things next election by advancing the date of the primary from the first Tuesday in June to the first Tuesday in March. That would put the state just after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and before the consolidated Super Tuesday election of Southern states, providing everyone else keeps to the 1988 timetable.

“It takes some of the emphasis off the early primary states,” Brown said about moving California ahead in the queue. “These candidates who have been spending 130 days in Iowa, for example, will have to spend a lot of their time in California. And some can argue that since California is much more important in electing a President, you ought to pay more attention to California early.”

Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno) is the author of the pending legislation to move up the primary. He said it was a matter of increasing California’s voice on issues ranging from transportation to air pollution to immigration.

Costa said he could count on overpowering leadership support to move the proposal through the Assembly. But in the Senate, President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) continues to express reservations.

Roberti is concerned about how a March primary would affect Legislative races.

“He thinks it would add to the cost of campaigns, since there would be a longer period before the general election. And he is worried that voters already turned off will be further turned off by a still longer campaign,” spokesman Robert Forsythe said.

Forsythe added, however, “He is not at this point committed to stopping this on his own.”

Costa indicated that he might be willing to compromise and split the difference, moving the primary from June to the second Tuesday in April in consolidation with municipal elections in some communities.

Brown was in California for a Democratic Party finance meeting and to venture into the lion’s den by opening a party office in heavily Republican Orange County.