Incumbents Coast, 2 Challengers Struggle

South Bay incumbents breezed through their primaries, but a pair of Democrat challengers remain locked in a struggle to determine which of them will face U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) in the Nov. 6 general election.

Of the dozen congressmen, assemblymen and state senators up for reelection in the region, only U.S. Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton) and Assemblyman Dave Elder (D-San Pedro) faced primary opposition Tuesday.

Neither politician was put to the test.

Dymally trounced two challengers, Inglewood lawyer Lawrence A. Grigsby and former Compton College Trustee Carl E. Robinson Sr., garnering 73% of the vote to Grigsby’s 15% and Robinson’s 12%. Elder crushed his lone opponent, unemployed physics teacher Ed Musgrave of Long Beach, winning 85% of the ballots.

“Rarely in my experience does an incumbent get more than 70%,” Elder said Wednesday. “This is quite a pleasant outcome.”

The South Bay’s other state and federal legislative races involved little-known challengers running for the right to face U.S. Reps. Rohrabacher, Glenn M. Anderson (D-San Pedro) and Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) in the fall.

In the fight among Democrats vying to take on Rohrabacher, political science instructor Guy C. Kimbrough of Huntington Beach was only 14 votes ahead of computer industry publisher James Cavuoto of Torrance with more than 38,000 ballots counted.

A third candidate, retired high school teacher Bryan W. Stevens of Rolling Hills Estates, was 1,204 votes off the pace. Election officials said an undetermined number of late-arriving absentee ballots remain to be counted.

In a two-man GOP battle over who would challenge Levine, West Los Angeles lawyer David Barrett Cohen sailed past Playa del Rey computer salesman Hans Yeager with 64% of the vote.

Another two-way GOP battle, this one for the right to challenge Anderson, was won by Sanford W. Kahn, a gas company salesman from Long Beach, who collected 58% of the vote to beat Jerry Bakke of Wilmington, an insurance agent and former truckers union leader.

Operating with shoestring campaign budgets in districts dominated by the opposing party, the winning challengers acknowledged Wednesday that they will have a hard time unseating incumbents in the Nov. 6 general election. But they expressed optimism nonetheless.

Said Kahn of his upcoming race against Anderson, an 11-term incumbent: “I think there is a strong anti-incumbent feeling. If I can play on that . . . I think the public is ready.”

Dymally’s win came amid charges by Grigsby that the five-term incumbent is too closely tied to Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, whose government has been identified by the U.S. State Department as repressive and corrupt.

One of Grigsby’s flyers said: “Your congressman works for a billionaire dictator. Not for you.” Dymally, a longtime supporter of Mobutu, dismissed Grigsby’s attacks as part of a plot by the New York-based New Alliance Party to discredit him.

Having prevailed in the primary, Dymally must now beat Republican Eunice N. Sato, a former Long Beach City Council member, to keep his seat in the 31st Congressional District, which includes Hawthorne, Gardena, Carson and Harbor Gateway in the South Bay.

Elder’s victory followed an extremely low-key primary campaign. Musgrave, Elder’s opponent, said he had enough money to campaign in only four of the 204 precincts in the 57th Assembly District, which embraces San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City and much of Long Beach.

Elder’s Republican challenger in the general election, welfare caseworker Rodney D. Guarneri of Long Beach, says he will also have limited supplies of campaign funds. But Guarneri vows he will hit the streets.

“I don’t have resources of the kind Dave Elder has, but I’m going to meet people at the door,” Guarneri said. “With the kind of stamina I have and the time I have, I should be able to walk a lot of precincts. I’m going to be going full bore.”

The closest thing to competition in the South Bay’s legislative races occurred in three congressional primaries where challengers vied with each other for the right to take on incumbents in November.

Most striking was the still-unresolved race by Democrats competing to run against Rohrabacher in the 42nd Congressional District, which stretches from Torrance and the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Huntington Beach.

The race may boil down to Kimbrough’s decision to send a campaign mailing to absentee voters--and Cavuoto’s failure to do so.

Election officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties said Wednesday that the only ballots remaining to be counted were absentee votes received on Election Day. Kimbrough, who had been outpacing Cavuoto among absentees by better than a 2-1 margin, appeared confident that he would win.

“I would expect the absentee ballots would be pretty much in line with the earlier ones,” said Kimbrough, who lost to Rohrabacher 33% to 64% in the 1988 general election. “The final tally will likely show me a few hundred votes ahead.”

But Cavuoto, making his first run for public office, expressed confidence. Many of the absentee voters whose ballots were received on Election Day may not have left home before getting his regular campaign mailings, he said.

“I think I’ve got a good chance,” he said. “I’m very encouraged.” Cavuoto said he had not decided whether he would request a recount.

In the GOP primary in Anderson’s 32nd Congressional District, which includes San Pedro and Lomita, Kahn won despite collecting less than half the amount of campaign cash raised by Bakke. That gives him a chance to challenge Anderson for the second time. In 1988, Anderson beat Kahn by a margin of better than 2 to 1.

In Levine’s 27th Congressional District--which in the South Bay encompasses Lawndale, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo and parts of Torrance and Inglewood--both GOP challengers were political newcomers.

But Barrett Cohen quit his job as a corporate lawyer to devote all his time to the campaign, out-organizing and outspending Yeager. On Wednesday, he vowed he would give Levine a fight, despite the incumbent’s gargantuan $1.5-million campaign war chest.

“I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Cohen said. “I don’t intend to be anybody’s sacrificial lamb.”