1st District Candidates Aiming for the Heart : Politics: With a crowded field and a campaign of only 10 weeks, there has been little time for raising issues.

Faced with a lack of time and a crowded field, candidates in the historic race to become Los Angeles County’s first Latino supervisor in 115 years are focusing on only a handful of issues and instead are trying to strike powerful emotional chords in voters.

Managers of the four major candidates, all Latinos, concede that for a variety of reasons the Jan. 22 election does not offer many opportunities to learn which issues are relevant to voters in the newly created 1st District and to publicly debate them.

They are trying to win the hearts, not necessarily the minds, of voters. Only a handful of key issues have been raised--pollution in the San Gabriel Valley, the growing specter of homelessness, the state’s controversial program of spraying malathion to eradicate the Medfly.

Career county bureaucrat Sarah Flores, sensing disgust with the political status quo, has taken every opportunity to strike a pose as the field’s only non-politician.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina is portraying herself as a fighter for the little person.

State Sen. Art Torres has been touting his legislative experience.

State Sen. Charles Calderon, contending that the mood of the district has been misread by his more liberal and his more conservative opponents, says he is a safe moderate.

Despite such efforts by the candidates to distinguish themselves from the pack and grab voter attention with a handful of issues, campaign strategists say that, in the end, voters will select the candidate whose values and ideology appear closest to their own.

Voters will follow their “natural political tendencies” said Richie Ross, a veteran campaign strategist hired by Calderon. “The campaign, for all the huffing and puffing, will be of minimal effectiveness.”

Ross and others say the main reason is the short campaign: A federal judge in early November ordered the election, allowing 10 weeks to wage campaigns that usually unfold over the course of a year.

There is no time for thorough polling. No time to walk the 25-mile-long precinct knocking on every voter’s door. Candidates usually have a year to raise the $300,000 to $400,000 needed for a supervisorial race, but must now raise that in a matter of weeks. The holidays have also gotten in the way.

The Persian Gulf crisis is playing a role, too. “The attention span on this race is going to be narrow,” said Eric Rose, campaign manager for Flores. “If the United States goes to war Jan. 15, the world will be focused on the Persian Gulf. . . . It means that we should target a lot of our get-out-the-vote effort before Jan. 15.”

The short campaign has left no room for mistakes.

“I don’t think you can test to see if the strategy is working and change it if it’s not,” said Dina Huniu, campaign manager for Calderon. “Instead, you have to pick your strategy and run with it until Election Day.”

The professional political handlers say their goal is to put their candidate among the top two vote-getters Jan. 22. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote--a likely outcome with nine candidates in the race--the top two will face off Feb. 19.

Creation of a new district was ordered by a federal judge who found that the former district lines discriminated against Latinos.

Molina appears to be the candidate to beat, according to strategists for Calderon, Flores and Torres.

“I’d like to know who Gloria Molina is mailing to, and she’d like to know which voters we are mailing to, and that is the whole race,” said Ron Smith, campaign consultant to Flores. “Molina is the only competition. Torres has high negatives, and Calderon we are not even worrying about.”

Calderon’s advisers say that they have written off Torres, while Torres’ camp claims that it is “his race to lose.”

The strategists generally were reluctant to discuss specifics of their game plans for fear of aiding the opposition. Molina’s consultant, Pat Bond, said she did not want to discuss campaign strategy and preferred not to guess which candidates will take the lead.

Candidates agreed, however, that the bulk of their funds will be spent sending loads of political mailers to the most active of the district’s 370,000 registered voters. They also will call and visit some homes, and will rely heavily upon absentee ballots.

The candidates will be fighting over as few as 70,000 actual votes because, like most single-issue special elections, the contest is expected to attract a 20% voter turnout, or worse. Molina’s camp said it is mounting a door-to-door voter-registration and get-out-the-vote effort to try to raise turnout to 30%.

Even if turnout hits 30%, it means candidates must somehow find the most active voters--”pathological voters,” consultants call them--in the district stretching from drug-troubled streets in Pico-Union to split-level homes in La Puente.

Ross predicted that voters will receive more than 40 mailers--nearly one each day until the election, with the pace intensifying after New Year’s Day.

“Everybody is going to send out a piece from some cops’ group saying their candidate is tough on crime,” said David Townsend, a Sacramento campaign consultant to Torres.

The candidates also have a busier schedule of campaign appearances than usual. Campaign managers have been hustling for free radio and TV time. Candidates are sprinting from candidates’ forums to fund-raisers to meetings with potential endorsers.

The four major candidates have failed to specify how, without additional revenues, they would meet their promises of putting more money into law enforcement, health care and cleanup of the polluted air and ground water in the San Gabriel Valley.

Because of the nature of county government, there is a limit to what a new supervisor can do--no matter who is elected. The county relies on the state for a large part of its funding, and there is little prospect of help from Sacramento, which has its own budget problems.

Flores tells audiences: “I’m not a politician. I’m a county employee.” She has said that the only solution to the county’s budget woes is for the state or federal government to provide more money.

Molina told a group of wealthy businesswomen, Democratic activists and service providers for the homeless recently that “the private sector will need to join government to resolve many of these issues.”

Torres says simply, “I and I alone have the most credentials and experience to deal with these issues.”

Calderon has said the county should look for new ways to bring in revenues, and should not “cut one cent from the public safety budget”--his most prominent issue.

The election of Molina, Torres or Calderon--all Democrats--to the board now controlled by Republicans would result in a dramatic change of ideology on the deeply conservative board, giving this election unusually high stakes for a local contest.

Some observers contend that even the election of Flores, a Republican who is more moderate than retiring Supervisor Pete Schabarum, would alter the nature of the powerful board.

With the holidays over, each candidate is expected to launch an intense effort to ensure a spot in the runoff.

Molina’s campaign is reaching eastward, beyond her base in the heavily urban Eastside of Los Angeles, said her consultant, Bond. She noted that it is “no accident” that Molina’s campaign headquarters was placed in El Monte, the heart of the district’s suburban voting territory.

“My goal for Gloria is to get her as many Democratic, Republican and independent votes as I can, and that means we can’t afford to ignore anybody,” Bond said.

Bond said Molina’s appeal as an activist who gets things done cuts across party lines. “She has that ‘beat the bureaucracy’ sort of image,” Bond said. “On the council, she has some very conservative positions on crime and spending.”

However, Calderon’s handler, Ross, said his opponents are making a mistake by discounting Calderon’s middle-of-the-road appeal.

He said Calderon’s strategy hinges on voters in the suburban San Gabriel Valley. While Flores will receive most GOP votes, she will not be able to attract these “bedrock” Democrats, Ross said. (Although the race is nonpartisan, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 3 to 1.)

Calderon “starts with a built-in constituency of hard-working, blue-collar, middle-class voters,” said Huniu, his campaign manager. “They aren’t interested in liberal policies.”

Flores tells voters that she knows the most about county government because of her 33 years of county service, but is not part of the political Establishment.

“Sarah is the Gloria Molina of this campaign,” said Flores consultant Smith. “Gloria has become the political boss. Sarah is going to run as the non-Establishment.”

Torres is portraying himself as the most experienced in the legislative arena and a good friend of labor.

“One out of every three households in this district has a union member,” Townsend said. “Labor is going to be a major factor in the success of our campaign.”

In a brochure, Torres touts his Sacramento accomplishments, including fighting construction of a prison in East Los Angeles, opposing malathion spraying and supporting tougher sentencing for criminals.

The candidates have all pledged to conduct positive campaigns, but some said they expect last-minute “hit pieces” to arrive at voters’ homes.

Flores stood up at a recent candidates forum and told the other candidates in an accusatory tone: “Someone was taking a picture of my house.”

Flores does not live in the 1st District but in well-to-do Glendora--an issue that is likely to come up. Under a court ruling, anyone who lives within the former 1st District boundaries is eligible to run in the new district. “I think they might say (in a mailer), ‘Here is this rich Republican,’ ” Flores said.

Her response? “Here is what you can achieve from hard work.”

Flores’ advisers have repeatedly insisted that they will not attack any candidate, but they have already fired a hotly worded volley at Molina. Smith, Flores’ consultant, claimed recently that the councilwoman is “singularly responsible for the drugs and crime that have devastated MacArthur Park.”

“So much for positive campaigning,” remarked Townsend.