STATE ELECTIONS 78TH ASSEMBLY DISTRICT : ‘Double Election’ Is Double Trouble for Gotch, Marston

In a campaign perhaps more notable for its unorthodox, confusing format than for its content, a former San Diego city councilman and a one-time City Hall aide will compete in two races on the same day next month for a vacant state Assembly seat.

Any one of the unusual characteristics of the race for the 78th Assembly District seat vacated by Democrat Lucy Killea’s election to the state Senate last December would be sufficient to drive voters--as well as election officials and the candidates themselves--to distraction.

Unfortunately for all parties involved, the June 5 “double election”--a political rarity as intriguing as it is perplexing--is only the start of the confusion in the contest between former Democratic Councilman Mike Gotch and Republican Jeff Marston.

Adding to the potential bewilderment is the fact that Gotch and Marston will share one of next month’s ballots with a handful of other candidates not running, increasing concerns that confused voters may erroneously conclude that they must vote for different candidates in the two contests. The likelihood that Gotch and Marston will face each other again this fall--their third confrontation within seven months--provides a fitting backdrop to a campaign that even county Registrar of Voters Conny McCormack describes as “a recipe how not to run an election.”

“Our slogan’s going to be: ‘Vote early, vote often, vote Jeff,’ ” joked Marston consultant Sara Katz, whose candidate was an upset first-place finisher in the six-candidate special April primary that was the initial step toward filling Killea’s former seat.

Billing June’s election as “Round 2” in a three-round contest, Marston and Gotch face the peculiar political challenge of having to simultaneously win two races: the special runoff for the six months remaining in Killea’s unexpired term and their respective parties’ primary nominations for the two-year term at stake in November. Victory in the former, both candidates acknowledge, will generate powerful, perhaps unstoppable, momentum for a repeat win this fall.

Beyond its puzzling makeup, there are other compelling aspects to the campaign--notably, the rarity of an open state legislative race, combined with a partisan balance that makes the 78th District among the most competitive in the state. With Democrats holding only a slim 45%-41% voter registration edge, the district was, throughout Killea’s four terms, the most heavily Republican legislative district represented by a Democrat in the state.

Despite those factors, the campaign has been waged in relative obscurity, since Marston and Gotch finished first and second, respectively, in the primary to qualify for the runoff. By virtue of running unopposed in her Peace and Freedom Party primary, teacher Jane Rocio Evans also will be on June’s special runoff ballot.

After having the political stage largely to themselves before April’s special primary, Gotch and Marston have watched their race assume a progressively lower profile as several other campaigns--including some in which longtime congressional and state legislative incumbents face strong primary challenges--diverted press and public attention.

“We’ve gotten a little lost in the shuffle, and that’s been frustrating,” Gotch said. “That’s made it more difficult to articulate the issues and focus on the differences.”

The candidates’ philosophical similarity on most major issues also has complicated their attempt to distinguish themselves to voters in the 78th District, which stretches along the coast from Ocean Beach to Pacific Beach, extending inland to the Miramar Naval Air Station in the north, south to downtown San Diego and east to East San Diego.

Both Gotch and Marston favor abortion rights, capital punishment and a ban on assault weapons, and oppose offshore oil drilling and aerial malathion spraying. Each also backs one of the major ballot measures that will be before statewide voters next month--Proposition 111, which would double the current 9-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax over five years to finance an $18.5-billion highway and transportation improvement program.

Moreover, their standard stump speeches differ more in style than substance, revolving around generalities about protecting the environment, improving education and health care, reducing crime and drug problems and gaining more state money for San Diego.

Among their few policy differences, Gotch favors a 15-day waiting period for the purchase of rifles, supports increasing the minimum wage and opposes Proposition 119’s plan to turn over legislative reapportionment to an independent commission, with Marston taking the opposite position on each issue. Marston also has called for restoring the De Anza mobile home park and camp land to natural habitat when their respective leases expire early in the next century, while Gotch has committed himself to doing so only in regard to the mobile home park. Until a substitute coastline camp land is available, “I don’t want to give up the only one we have,” Gotch explains.

Even the candidates, however, admit that their disagreements more often deal with nuance than with black-and-white distinctions. To discern the major difference in the race, the 42-year-old Gotch argues, voters must look to the candidates’ backgrounds--a comparison that enables him to contrast his own elective office experience to Marston’s work on the staffs of two Republican officeholders. “If you want to see the clearest distinction, it’s that my opponent has functioned as an office manager, a mid-level staff person, while I have experience as an elected member of the City Council,” said Gotch, who served on the council from 1979 to 1987. “I made the decisions, built the coalitions, and provided eight years of tough, independent leadership. Jeff likes to say, ‘I know how to push buttons, too.’ But the job’s a lot more complex that.”

In response, Marston, a one-time aide to former San Diego City Councilwoman Gloria McColl and Sen. S. I. Hayakawa (R-Calif.), contends that his own staff work involved “doing everything but pushing the button” on a wide range of local and statewide issues.

“As a staff person, I did the nuts-and-bolts work from top to bottom on these issues,” the 34-year-old Marston said. “Like most elected officials, when a problem came to Mike, he’d turn it over to his staff person to handle. If he wants to compare backgrounds, you could say that I was out attending all the community and neighborhood meetings that Mike didn’t.”

If Gotch’s record allows him to rightly cast himself as the race’s only “tried and tested” candidate, it also makes an inviting target for Marston.

In particular, Marston consistently reminds campaign audiences that Gotch supported the controversial Belmont Park development and went to work for developer Doug Manchester after leaving the council in 1987--factors that he uses in an attempt to undermine Gotch’s otherwise solid environmental record. Though Gotch defends his Belmont Park vote as one that cleaned up a “dilapidated, crime-ridden area” in Mission Beach, his most effective rebuttal to criticism of his environmental credentials is his endorsement by the Sierra Club.

The primary’s outcome--Marston outpolled the former councilman, 36%-30%--represented an embarrassing setback for Gotch, whose high name recognition in a field of relative unknowns had made him such a prohibitive favorite that many of his top aides had predicted an outright 50%-plus victory in April.

“If the primary showed anything, it was that a lot of voters didn’t think much of the ‘tried-and-tested’ candidate,” said Marston aide Katz.

Forced to put the best possible face on his second-place finish, Gotch has stressed that the Democratic primary vote was divided among four candidates, while Marston was the only active Republican. Overall, Democratic candidates drew nearly 55% of the primary vote--more than 1 1/2 times Marston’s total, Gotch aides stress.

Despite the efforts of Gotch’s “spin” experts, Marston’s first-place primary finish significantly shifted momentum in his direction and caused activists in both parties to reevaluate the race’s political equation--in the process, obliterating the conventional wisdom that held that a Gotch victory was a virtual fait accompli .

In their effort to reverse the candidates’ finishing order, Gotch’s strategists are heartened by the fact that dramatically different dynamics will be at work in June than were evident in the special primary. With the Assembly race being the only issue on the 78th District ballot in April, voter turnout was only about 22%--much lower than is expected next month.

In addition, the contested Democratic gubernatorial primary between former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp could enhance Gotch’s candidacy by boosting Democratic turnout. In contrast, former San Diego mayor, now-Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) is the presumptive GOP nominee, lessening Republicans’ incentive to go to the polls.

“That probably is a small plus for Mike that we’ll have to deal with,” Marston said. “But they’re presuming that all of those votes that went to other Democrats in the primary will just fall into Mike’s lap. Since a lot of them were anti-Gotch votes in the first place, I think that’s a risky assumption.”

Inevitably, however, much of the attention in the 78th District campaign reverts to its unusual framework. Though the “double election” alone is sufficiently baffling, the race is further muddied by the inclusion of the five losers from April’s special primary on next month’s normal primary ballots--because, election officials said, it was too late for their names to be removed.

From the outset, both Gotch and Marston have worried that the juxtaposition of a special runoff and a routine primary on the same ballot could, understandably, confuse voters, prompting some to inaccurately conclude that they cannot vote for the same candidate twice.

Although election officials inserted a short explanatory note--”You are entitled to vote for a candidate in both races”--on the ballot, both major candidates doubt that that message will eliminate the confusion. Indeed, both Marston and Gotch share the same nightmare: that supporters who vote for them in the regular primary, which appears first on the ballot, will either neglect to do so--or, worse, vote for their opponent--in the special runoff.

“If you were going to lose some votes to confusion, you’d rather have that happen in the primary, where logically it wouldn’t hurt,” Marston said. “The runoff’s where every vote counts. Unfortunately, because of the (ballot) order, that’s exactly where the confusion might hurt you. I’m superstitious anyway, so that’s just one more thing to worry about.”