ELECTIONS : 37TH ASSEMBLY DISTRICT : Voter Recognition of Wright’s Record Credited for Victory

Campaign handlers for Republican Assemblywoman Cathie Wright on Wednesday attributed her hard-fought primary victory over challenger Hunt Braly to her success in communicating her legislative achievements and the failure of Braly’s repeated attacks on her ethics to strike home with voters.

Paradoxically, Braly blamed his defeat in part on media preoccupation with his attacks on Wright’s ethics and complained that it made it more difficult for him to campaign on policy issues such as managed growth.

“One of the frustrations of the campaign was that . . . all anyone wanted to talk about was ethics,” he said. “And we wanted to talk about other things.”

Wright, a five-term incumbent from Simi Valley, overpowered Braly by a margin of 59% to 41% in an expensive, bare-knuckles campaign that was one of the few hotly contested Assembly primaries in California this year.

The two candidates poured more than $530,000 into the struggle for the GOP nomination in the conservative 37th Assembly District, which stretches from the suburbs of northwestern Los Angeles County into portions of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Carlos Rodriguez, Wright’s campaign consultant, said she prevailed because she “ran a much more positive campaign” than Braly and “was able to refresh the people of the district of her achievements over the past 10 years.”

Braly, the top aide to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), jumped into the campaign against Wright last year after Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury concluded that Wright had tried to obtain special treatment for her daughter from local police, judges and motor-vehicle officials.

The younger Wright faced a jail term or loss of her license after running up 28 traffic tickets--24 for speeding--during a seven-year period.

Rodriguez said Braly, who repeatedly charged that Wright had misused her official position by trying to fix her daughter’s tickets, never managed to establish in voters’ minds how he would be better than her as a legislator.

“He attacked her incessantly . . . He just ran too negative a campaign,” Rodriguez said. “Negative campaigning works only if you establish what you stand for. And he was never able to establish what he stands for.”

Braly said the main reasons he was beaten were that he was “outspent by Cathie 2 to 1” and that the expanse of the three-county district made it hard for him to engage in the kind of personal, door-to-door campaigning necessary to unseat an incumbent.

He acknowledged that he was unable to build a positive image of himself among voters. But he said that was partly because the media paid more attention to his ethics arguments than to his positions on the environment and growth issues.

The ethics issue, he said, “was what made it exciting to the media and that’s what their hook always was.”

Braly maintained that his ability to raise $250,000 and his success in capturing nearly 41% of the primary vote against a well-known incumbent “says a lot about me as a candidate and my potential to run in other races.”

He added that he is interested in running again if a new, Santa Clarita-based Assembly seat is created during the upcoming reapportionment.

Times staff writers Betsy Bates and Santiago O’Donnell contributed to this story.