Weintraub Quits GOP, Registers as Democrat : Politics: Party switch may give her a better shot at Alan Robbins’ state Senate seat.

Los Angeles school board member Roberta Weintraub has changed her party registration from Republican to Democrat, prompting speculation that she is preparing to run for higher office, possibly for the seat held by embattled state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana).

The opportunities for Weintraub, who had been a Republican for more than a decade, may be good if the coming reapportionment shakes up the city’s political leadership as expected.

“There’s going to be a lot of musical chairs” because of reapportionment, said one political analyst, who asked not to be named.

“I think she’s interested in running for a partisan office,” said Alan Hoffenblum, a GOP political consultant with whom Weintraub conferred about her plans to switch parties.

“She thinks she can do better running for an East Valley-based seat as a Democrat--that’s what I surmised from our talk.”

Weintraub, 55, of Woodland Hills has been a colorful figure in Valley politics since the late 1970s, when she was a leader in the anti-busing movement.

In an interview, Weintraub said that someday she would like a higher office, but insisted that her change of party does not involve a “secret strategy” that targets a particular elected office. Instead, she said, it became untenable for her to be a Republican, given her changing perspective on the huge, urban and minority-dominated school district she represents.

“I was just no longer in sync with the Republican philosophy,” Weintraub said, differing with the GOP on funding for education, the use of vouchers to give families a choice of schools, abortion and health-care issues. So last Dec. 26, she registered as a Democrat.

Weintraub joined the Republican Party in 1978, leaving her Democratic Party roots over mandatory school busing. In 1979, she led a successful recall drive against school board President Howard Miller, a busing supporter, and was elected to the seven-member board.

Weintraub allied herself with other board members to form a conservative majority that led the fight against court-ordered busing.

One well-known GOP political strategist speculated that the likely target of Weintraub’s ambition was the state Senate seat held by Robbins, a Democrat. Robbins’ 20th District lies within Weintraub’s East Valley-based school board seat, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans.

Robbins is the target of a federal investigation into allegations that the senator in 1987 sought to extort $250,000 from a San Diego hotel developer.