Democratic Party Foot Soldiers Invade GOP Territory for a Day

The five-member team gathered at the rear of a trailer park in Santa Ana, armed with the tools of democracy: voter registration forms, petitions and the energy to knock on doors on a hot Saturday afternoon.

They knew they were venturing into potentially hostile territory. After all, they were Democrats seeking support in an area that elected archconservative U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove).

More than 70 people took to the streets and shopping malls of Santa Ana and Garden Grove in an effort “to let people know the Democratic Party is alive and well in Orange County,” said Tim Carpenter, an organizer of Peace Politics. The group is a coalition of the Orange County Democratic Central Committee, the Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club and the Alliance for Survival.

In addition to registering voters, volunteers were collecting signatures on a petition condemning Pringle for the hiring of poll guards, who stood watch over 20 heavily Latino precincts in Santa Ana in last November’s election. The guards were hired by the Orange County Republican Party at the request of Pringle’s campaign manager to prevent non-citizens from voting. Pringle won the election by about 800 votes, and the Democratic Party has sued Pringle over the poll guard issue.

Street-Wise Strategy

About 10 a.m., the volunteers began showing up at the balloon-festooned Orange County Democratic Party headquarters in Santa Ana. Kent Young and Eddie Fitts, both students at Cal State Los Angeles who live in Hawthorne, arrived a little late.

“We partied all last night,” said Fitts, 20, a novice at walking precincts. “I was going to stay in bed. But (Kent) made me get up and said, ‘Let’s go, man.’ ”

Young, 22, is a more experienced precinct walker. In a summer job last year, he worked registering voters for the Democratic Party. And now both young men found themselves clutching an armful of forms, staring down a street lined with mobile homes and listening to team captain Pam Barbara give instructions.

“We may get kicked out of here,” Barbara said, explaining that soliciting is prohibited in mobile-home parks. “So we’ll start in the back and work our way to the front and kind of stay away from the manager’s office up there.”

At first, Fitts was a little unsure of himself, sometimes stumbling over his words as a senior citizen cast a wary look at him through a screen door. But soon, he was warming up to his task, explaining that the poll-guard tactics may have intimidated people into not voting.

“I don’t understand how they could do something like that,” the woman said as she signed the petition. “Did they really stop people from voting?”

‘Nothing Really Bad Happens’

Then there were those who gave the volunteers a less-than-enthusiastic reception. “I don’t know anything about nothing and I don’t want to know,” one woman said.

Fitts and Young registered two people to vote: a blind woman who said she was unable to vote in the last election, and a young man who said he had lived in the trailer park for about a year.

Most of the park’s residents treated the volunteers politely, some taking a few minutes to read a flyer about Pringle before deciding whether to sign the petition.

“Nothing really bad happens,” Young said. “People ignore you sometimes, or slam doors in your face. . . . The worst thing that happened was when I had to miss a Laker game when I had to work a precinct.”

About 1 1/2 hours after arriving at the trailer park, the sweaty but jubilant team gathered at its starting place to compare results.

“It was great,” said Pam Zanelli of Santa Ana. “I even got homemade cookies from one lady.”

“Well, I got money,” piped up Barbara, who netted $3 in her effort to sell anti-Pringle buttons for $1 each. “I got people who said, ‘I don’t want the button, but I’ll give you a dollar.’ ”

All told, the team collected 37 petition signatures and registered four voters--two Republicans and two Democrats. Carpenter said that 41 voters were registered in Santa Ana and Garden Grove, and 350 people signed the anti-Pringle petition. Organizers have collected more than 9,000 signatures on the petitions since the drive began May 8, Carpenter said.

After finishing at the trailer park, the volunteers returned to Democratic Party headquarters for food, entertainment and a closing rally. The volunteers were surrounded by booths from the Democratic groups that sponsored the event, from pro-abortion advocates to supporters of farm workers’ rights.

“I thought this would be crazy,” Fitts said of his day in the political trenches. “This isn’t so bad.”