Election Yields Extraordinary Cast of Rivals : Primaries: In the past, an incumbent rarely faced serious opposition. But this year, five legislators face a real challenge from within their own party.

Little more than a year ago, political consultant Nick Johnson half-jokingly described San Diego elections as being “usually about as unpredictable as elections in Russia.”

“If you’re an incumbent here, it’s like being on the Communist Party ticket in Russia or East Germany,” the Democratic consultant said. “You’re that safe.”

Today, Johnson’s comparison is perhaps even more apt than when he made it, though for reasons he scarcely could have imagined at the time. For just as wildly unpredictable democratic reforms swept through Eastern bloc nations over the past year, so, too, has the spring of 1990 become a season of dramatic transformation in San Diego politics.

Five San Diego legislators--four state Assembly members and one congressman--face serious opposition in their June 5 party primaries. Collectively, those races set up the most competitive primary here in recent political history--a compelling departure from the norm in a county where partisan elections typically are races more in name than in fact.

“There’s never been anything like this in San Diego--it’s totally unprecedented,” said former Democratic Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin. “Primaries here usually are rather humdrum affairs. But this year, it’s family against family war.”

Three Democrats--Rep. Jim Bates and Assemblymen Pete Chacon and Steve Peace--and Republican Assemblywomen Sunny Mojonnier and Tricia Hunter face strong challenges in their respective primaries. With the exception of Hunter, who is running in her first reelection campaign after winning a special election last October, the challenges to the four others represent the first serious primary opposition that they have encountered in incumbencies stretching from seven to 20 years.

Traditionally in San Diego, state legislators and congressmen have drawn only token opposition from the other major party--and usually no ballot opposition at all within their own party. Indeed, longtime political activists say they cannot recall the last time that even a single San Diego officeholder in Sacramento or Washington faced a stiff primary test.

That historical pattern reflects certain political realities: the lopsided partisan composition of most local legislative and congressional districts, as well as incumbents’ daunting name-recognition and fund-raising advantages. By discouraging potentially serious challengers, those factors made local incumbents’ reelections a virtual fait accompli .

In rapid fashion, all that has changed this spring, in large measure because so many candidates have simultaneously proved willing to buck the conventional political wisdom that holds that one does not challenge an incumbent of his own party.

Theories abound as to why San Diego campaigns that previously were little more than electoral formalities have suddenly become competitive contests in which at least several incumbents’ seats are in jeopardy.

Incumbents’ ethical transgressions--three were the subject of official investigations during the past year--and controversial stands on volatile issues acted as a magnet for several of the challengers. Hunter’s advocacy of abortion rights in her conservative, heavily Republican 76th District, for example, all but guaranteed that she would draw opposition, as she has, from anti-abortion forces.

Most challengers also hope to capitalize on what they perceive as growing public dissatisfaction with incumbents in general, a disdain they attribute to recent scandals in Sacramento and Washington.

Others--lapsing, perhaps, into armchair psychology--detect a generational distinction, arguing that several candidates who grew up in the ‘60s are acting upon that decade’s skepticism toward authority by refusing to abide by “the old rules” of politics.

“To these people, there’s nothing sacrosanct about someone who’s been in office 6 or 10 or 20 years,” said campaign consultant Tom Shepard. “That lack of deference and unwillingness to blindly accept prevailing conventional wisdom is a legacy of the ‘60s.”

Consultant Jack Orr added: “That’s especially true among women. We’re seeing the second generation of women, who no longer have the ERA and women’s rights topping their agenda, pushing ahead in politics in other ways. The women of the ‘60s are coming of age, and they’re not willing to quietly bide their time waiting for openings. They want it now.”

This year’s preponderance of primary challenges also reflects both major parties’ diminished clout and inability to impose party “discipline” upon ambitious challengers in order to avoid primary battles that can dissipate resources and divide the party.

“I’m not sure we should tell people they can or can’t run,” said Bettie Kujawa, head of the San Diego County Republican Party. “It’s the role of the party to glue it all back together after the primary to make sure we win in November. But, yes, a bitter primary sometimes makes that job more difficult.”

Of the incumbents facing June primaries, Mojonnier, Chacon and Bates--in that order--are widely viewed as potentially the most vulnerable, largely because each has been buffeted by serious ethical charges that compounded existing questions about their overall effectiveness.

In contrast, Hunter and Peace, while both facing credible challengers, are generally expected to survive, barring a disastrous blunder on their part in the next two months. But even in those two races, it is a measure of the changed realities of San Diego politics that there is any uncertainty about the outcome.

Hunter’s opponent is Connie Youngkin, a leader of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that stages regular protests in front of abortion clinics. For her part in one demonstration, Youngkin was convicted of trespassing and faces a six-month sentence--creating the prospect that she could be in jail on Election Day. Undaunted, Youngkin has said: “First I go to jail, then I go to Sacramento. . . . Some of them go to Sacramento and then go to jail.”

Peace’s abrasive style was cited by both of his primary opponents--lawyers Darrel Vandeveld and Robert Garcia--as a factor in their decision to run in the 80th Assembly District. But Peace has out raised both by a more than 2-1 ratio, and Vandeveld has been put on the defensive by revelations that optometrists who wanted to do business with the 15,000-member retail clerk’s union headed by his father were allegedly asked to donate $500 each to his campaign.

Within political circles, Mojonnier is regarded as the local incumbent with arguably the most serious problems in June. Mired in a series of ethics-related controversies, the Encinitas Republican faces three GOP challengers--former Del Mar Mayor Ronnie Delaney, La Jolla businesswomen Fay McGrath and Poway school board member Stan Rodkin--in her bid for her party’s nomination for a fifth two-year term in the 75th Assembly District.

Recent months have produced frequent embarrassing headlines for Mojonnier.

In February, Mojonnier agreed to pay a $13,200 fine for double-billing the state and her campaign committee for business trips, as well as for using political donations to pay for fashion and beauty treatments for her staff. Along with other state legislators, she also has been criticized for routinely using state-paid sergeants-at-arms for personal tasks, such as chauffeuring her children and escorting her home after evening parties.

An issue from Mojonnier’s last campaign--her 1987 acceptance of a $10,000 speaking fee from the California Police Officers Assn. after leaving her sickbed to vote for a new Los Angeles prison--also could have a lingering effect on this race. Though the state attorney general’s office ruled that the award did not violate state law, opponents argue that it at least raised ethical questions.

“If not dead meat, Mojonnier’s close to it,” said consultant Shepard, who handled the unsuccessful 1982 campaign of Mojonnier’s Democratic opponent.

Though acknowledging that she takes her primary challenge “very, very seriously,” Mojonnier professes confidence that she will retain her party’s nomination--a scenario based in part on the hope that her three opponents will splinter the anti-incumbent vote.

Former Del Mar Mayor Delaney concedes the likelihood of a divided vote but argues that the four-candidate race also reflects “the strong level of dissatisfaction with the incumbent.”

“When three candidates challenge an incumbent in a primary, it tells you that something is not right here,” Delaney said.

Consultant Jim Johnston, who is uninvolved in the 75th District race, argues that Mojonnier’s own woes will make it difficult, if not impossible, for her to separate herself from what he predicts will be a strong anti-incumbent backlash in this year’s elections.

“Even if you conduct yourself with all due ethical and personal decorum, this is a tough time to be an incumbent because of the kind of news that’s been coming out of Sacramento and Washington,” Johnston said. “If you’re caught up in one of these messes yourself, you’re obviously in much deeper trouble. I think the dissatisfaction has built up to the point that people feel it’s time for a change, that whomever they put in has to be better.”

Both Chacon and Bates face similar problems in their Democratic primaries in the 79th Assembly District and 44th Congressional District, respectively.

In recent years, Chacon, first elected in 1970, has occasionally dropped broad hints that he was contemplating retirement, an inclination that some within his own party privately suggest he should have followed. A recent California Journal article ranked Chacon next-to-last in overall effectiveness in the Assembly, and he has drawn increasing criticism for spending far less time in San Diego than he does in his home in Placerville, near Sacramento.

Another controversy certain to be given wide circulation in the primary campaign involves Chacon’s acceptance of $7,500 from a check cashers’ organization in 1988 after he abandoned legislation opposed by the group, with more than half of the money--$4,000--coming on the same day that the bill was shelved. Though the state attorney general’s office concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Chacon with a bribe--he insists the timing of the payments was a coincidence and did not prompt him to drop the bill--his critics contend that the gift places Chacon in the same murky ethical waters as Mojonnier finds herself.

Like Mojonnier, Chacon downplays his opposition as “part of the democratic process” and claims to be “invigorated” by his primary challenge. But one of his opponents--former San Diego City Councilwoman Celia Ballesteros--represents the most serious challenge that he has faced throughout his 10-term career, thanks to her name-recognition and fund-raising capability. Ballesteros, who out-raised Chacon, $41,559 to $27,549, from Jan. 1 to March 17, is expected to receive an additional fund-raising boost from abortion-rights groups that oppose Chacon’s consistent anti-abortion record.

The third candidate in the 79th District Democratic primary--John Warren, the editor of Voice and Viewpoint, a black community newspaper--is regarded as a long shot. The votes he siphons from the two front-runners, however, could affect the outcome.

Bates, meanwhile, is expected to face a tough challenge in the wake of his rebuke by the House Ethics Committee last year for sexually harassing two female staffers. What the four-term incumbent did not expect, however, was to find that his first hurdle is, not the Republican Party, but rather fellow Democrat Byron Georgiou, a lawyer and longtime party activist.

Arguing that Bates’ sanction by the ethics committee on the sexual harassment charges and for improperly using his congressional staff for political purposes has severely weakened him, Georgiou contends that the Democrats’ chances of retaining the seat in November will be better if Bates is not the party’s nominee. Few Democratic leaders, however, share his analysis.

“I think Byron may be burning some bridges,” said San Diego Democratic Party Chairman Irma Munoz. “Any time you challenge your own party’s incumbent, there are consequences.”

Those consequences vary, however, from candidate to candidate. At last week’s Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the local Democratic Party’s major annual fund-raiser, Georgiou received only a light ripple of applause when introduced, a contrast to the prolonged, warm applause that greeted Ballesteros.

“Two very different reactions to the same sin,” noted former congressman Van Deerlin.

Even so, many feel that even if Georgiou loses his uphill campaign, he probably will not have irreparably harmed his long-term political goals--a belief founded primarily on the premise that, increasingly, candidates have little to fear from party leaders’ displeasure.

There was a time, Van Deerlin recalls, when candidates “wouldn’t think of making a peep” contrary to party leaders’ wishes. In those days, strong party organizations raised most of the candidates’ money and lined up their volunteers. Now, however, local candidates’ own organizations are often stronger than that of their party.

“These days,” the congressman concluded, “you can get away with giving the party the finger.”