NEWS ANALYSIS : Measure M Bucked Trends, Tradition : Taxes: Canny strategy, worsening traffic, good voter turnout combined to lift O.C. transit initiative, even as other pocketbook measures were rejected.

It took ever-worsening Orange County traffic, relatively high voter turnout and a canny campaign strategy to pull Measure M from the ashes of last year’s defeat, political experts said Wednesday as they sifted through nearly complete election returns.

On Tuesday, the controversial half-cent sales tax overcame formidable obstacles--including a sluggish national economy and recent increases in state and federal gasoline taxes--and still managed to pass, 54% to 46%, on a night when statewide voters resoundingly rejected measures that took aim at their pocketbooks.

“In many respects, Orange County came of age last night,” said Newport Beach political analyst Harvey Englander. “The voters here decided to shoulder responsibility for themselves, which is actually a very conservative thought.”

Measure M’s victory was made more remarkable by the failure of two state alcohol-tax proposals and two initiatives that proposed taxing residents to pay for fighting crime and drug abuse. All four of those measures went down to defeat in Orange County as well, but Measure M escaped being lumped together with them.

A transportation sales tax in Los Angeles County passed as well, but voters there had previously backed a transportation tax, so observers were less surprised by that election. Ventura County voters soundly rejected a sales tax on their ballot.

The combination of Measure M’s victory and the statewide rejection of most tax proposals created an extraordinary moment in Orange County politics: Voters here, traditionally the most conservative in the state, found themselves ahead of many Californians in voting to charge themselves more for government programs.

“It’s ironic on the surface,” Reed Royalty, the Pacific Bell executive who led the pro-Measure M campaign, said Wednesday.

“But I think what it shows is that Orange County people aren’t necessarily averse to paying taxes,” he said. “I think they’re willing to pay taxes when they know what they’re getting. . . . I’m not against paying for groceries when I know what they are. It’s when I go to the grocery store and am asked to buy an unmarked can of goods that I’m averse to it.”

Armed with the conviction--and the polling data--that other county voters would share that view, Measure M’s backers directed their 1990 campaign toward informing residents of exactly what they would get for their half-cent on the dollar. Supporters also benefited from reasonably strong voter turnout, unlike that of 1989, which guaranteed a broader cross-section of voters at the polls rather than a concentration of Orange County’s deeply conservative core electorate.

And in the time from last year’s defeat to this year’s victory, traffic continued to get worse, feeding the frustration that Measure M promises to combat.

Supporters of the tax credited that combination of strategy and circumstance for their victory; opponents, tenacious in their underfunded efforts to derail the tax, were bitter in defeat. Voters, they said, were duped.

“The people were fooled into believing that these projects have merit, when most of them don’t,” said Bill Ward, a spokesman for Drivers for Highway Safety, which opposes Measure M partly because it will help pay for car-pool lanes. “They were just plain fooled.”

Tom Rogers, a San Juan Capistrano slow-growth advocate and leader of the anti-M campaign, likewise said voters mistakenly embraced a poor remedy to the region’s increasingly snarled traffic: “I think that people were so desperate that they were willing to tax themselves for any solution to the traffic mess, good or bad.”

Unlike last year’s campaign, in which a county-record $2.5 million was spent in defeat, the 1990 effort consistently kept a lower profile. Supporters still raised more than $1 million this year, most of it from developers and big business interests, but the lower-intensity campaign drew less attention to the measure’s developer backing.

Still, as Election Day drew near, prospects for Measure M remained uncertain. Polls in the closing days of the campaign showed that the proposal enjoyed a narrow lead, but support was still short of a majority. The poll numbers, in fact, closely resembled those in the closing days of the 1989 race.

In 1989, Measure M took a narrow poll advantage into the election only to fail, 53% to 47%. A 1-cent tax proposal in 1984 was even more overwhelmingly defeated, with 70% of county voters who cast ballots voting against it.

Confronted with a shaky lead, Measure M backers waged a low-key, last-minute mail and telephone campaign that many observers credited with putting the proposal over the top. The mailers were informational and understated, part of the campaign’s intentional desire to steer away from a furious rhetorical battle as Election Day drew near.

“We ran a low-profile campaign targeted to voters willing to listen,” said David J. Townsend, a Sacramento-based political consultant who advised the Measure M campaign.