CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / SECRETARY OF STATE : Voter Disinterest Hobbles Flores in Race Against Eu

Joan Milke Flores paced outside the county administration building in San Diego one morning last week, waiting for the news media to arrive for a press conference.

“Thank you,” she sighed with relief when a lone reporter approached the portable lectern. “You’ve saved me from a candidate’s nightmare.”

Short on money but long on ambition, Flores has learned the value of news coverage, the free exposure of campaigns, in her bid to unseat four-term incumbent Secretary of State March Fong Eu.

The Republican challenger from San Pedro, however, has also learned a more sobering lesson during her first run for statewide office: It is tough creating interest in a race that few people know--or seem to care--much about.

“The fact of the matter is, for 16 years March Fong Eu has been missing in action,” Flores complained recently to a group of conservative Republican contributors. “My campaign started with a challenge for her to come out of hiding and account for the failures of her office. She hasn’t accepted my offer.”

Eu, traditionally one of California’s top vote-getters, has frustrated her opponent by sticking to a strategy that has served her well in campaigns past. The 68-year-old former state assemblywoman--who first gained statewide attention in the early 1970s for crusading against pay toilets--has simply ignored both Flores and Peace and Freedom candidate Evelina Alarcon.

“I don’t pay much attention to what my opponent says,” Eu confessed in an interview at her Los Angeles office.

Aside from occasional fund-raisers and Democratic Party functions, Eu has scheduled no formal campaign appearances. Instead, she has piggybacked her campaign on her official duties as California’s chief elections officer, which take her around the state lending a hand to voter registration drives. She keeps the trunk of her car well stocked with campaign literature for those who ask.

“I have always campaigned on a positive note,” Eu said. “That is what I believe in, what campaigning is all about. Let people know what you are doing and let people decide whether that is the person they want to continue in the job.”

Eu is making few promises about her next term, running instead on her record of service during the last four. Polls show her leading Flores by wide a margin, including a Los Angeles Times Poll in August that gave Eu a nearly 4-to-1 edge.

Last week, Eu left little doubt about her degree of confidence when she dipped into her campaign treasury to pay for $75,000 in television ads promoting voter registration. The victim of a brutal attack in her Hancock Park home several years ago, Eu said she may also use campaign funds to pay for advertisements about victims’ rights.

Opponents point out that the ads are not entirely altruistic because they contain a photograph and mention of her campaign committee. Eu’s campaign points out that both forms of identification are required by state disclosure laws.

“This may well be as aggressive as we are going to get,” said Leo McElroy, a Sacramento consultant running Eu’s reelection campaign. He predicted Eu would spend about $500,000 on the reelection effort and more if she feels threatened.

There is little argument that Flores is capable of mounting the most serious challenge yet to Eu. The three-term Los Angeles city councilwoman is a spirited campaigner and has a reputation in Los Angeles for being able to attract lots of money. She already has raised more funds than any of Eu’s previous foes.

Flores entered the Republican primary last spring with a bankroll nearing $600,000 from developers, trade unions and others who supported her City Council campaigns. The money became unusable for future council races when Los Angeles voters approved a Charter amendment placing limits on campaign spending.

Flores reluctantly spent most of that bankroll to defeat her primary opponent in June, but she has hired Republican fund-raiser Joyce Valdez to replenish the campaign treasury. At a recent fund-raiser in downtown Los Angeles, Flores collected $300,000 from some of her most loyal supporters, and she predicts she will top $1 million before the Nov. 6 election.

Skeptics say it may not be enough. Despite general ignorance of what she does on the job, polls show Eu enjoys strong positive name identification statewide. Former Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, who mustered 26% of the vote in his 1986 bid against Eu, predicted Flores will need close to $3 million to overcome Eu’s formidable popularity.

“A million dollars in this state doesn’t get you very far,” Nestande said. “It has no impact. It basically allows you to establish yourself and get a network.”

Flores acknowledges that her campaign could use more money, but she has had some difficulty outside her financial base in Los Angeles. Flores said she is trying to persuade the Republican Establishment that Eu’s job is worth fighting for.

It has been an uncanny change of roles for Flores, 54, who has never been regarded as strongly partisan. Flores got her start in politics working as a secretary for her Democratic predecessor on the City Council. When she succeeded him 25 years later, she had become adept at downplaying her Republicanism in an overwhelmingly Democratic district that includes some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods.

“The reason I am not getting lots of money from the Republican Party is that nobody really feels this is an important office,” Flores said. “Well, this office does matter, and that is my message.”

To get that message to the electorate, Flores has gone on the offensive, chasing the shadow of her opponent across the state. She has portrayed Eu as an “invisible secretary of state” who has little interest in the job and little ability to manage its seven divisions, 400 employees and $24-million annual budget.

In addition to administering state elections, the secretary of state’s office commissions notaries public, charters corporations, oversees the state archives, registers limited partnerships, tracks personal property used as collateral for commercial loans, and administers campaign disclosure statements by political candidates.

Flores has attacked Eu’s office on a several fronts, ranging from poor telephone service to inefficient computers. She says Eu must shoulder at least some of the blame for the state’s worsening voter turnout, which Eu herself has called “one of the major tragedies of our time.”

“I would like to blame her for the smog in Los Angeles and the crime in her district,” Eu shot back in a recent interview. “You can’t blame me for all of the ills of the country.”

Flores’ most damaging charges to date are that the state’s chief elections officer has violated the laws she was elected to administer.

Based on information gathered by researchers hired to dig through state files, Flores has repeatedly characterized Eu as “one of the most flagrant violators of campaign election law” in the state. Among other things, Flores charges that Eu reduced late filing fines against her own campaign committees from a total of $26,200 to $650 and also cut fines against one of Eu’s top contributors from $14,350 to $50.

Eu, who has the legal authority to reduce such fines, has dismissed Flores’ charges as “ridiculous.” She acknowledges that her office reduced the fines but insists that she has treated all violators the same, cutting fines across the board for those who inadvertently miss campaign disclosure deadlines.

Eu said that fines have been reduced only against “innocent volunteers” who would be turned off to politics if they were punished for their errors.

Flores has highlighted separate reporting violations against several of Eu’s campaign committees that resulted in an $8,000 fine against Eu by the Fair Political Practices Commission in March. In its decision, the FPPC said Eu “should have been well aware of the importance of these requirements, and taken steps to ensure that her own campaign complied with them.”

McElroy, Eu’s campaign consultant, described Flores’ revelations as “pretty thin soup,” but veteran Democratic strategist Richie Ross, who is not involved in the campaign, said they were “devastating.” Even so, Ross said, they will not win the election for Flores.

“It is a question of money,” Ross said. “I thought that the charges were devastating personally. I couldn’t believe it. I was floored. But the average voter isn’t going to hear those charges.”

Alarcon, the Peace and Freedom candidate, has steered clear of the debate over Eu’s campaign violations. She has concentrated her campaign in working-class neighborhoods, where she says people are turned off to politics because mainstream candidates “don’t address the basic issues that will affect them in a way that will really better their lives.”

Alarcon, 40, has proposed an “economic bill of rights” that would guarantee every Californian a job, housing, health care, quality education and child care.

“To a certain extent I would compare my campaign to what Jesse Jackson did in trying to raise the ante of issues to black people and working people and his concept of rainbow,” said Alarcon, an East Los Angeles political organizer for the Communist Party. “It is not easy, but somebody has to do it.”

Staff writer Jerry Gillam contributed to this story.