Countywide : Democrat Boxer Wins Support From Republican Regulars

A collection of about 20 longtime Republicans and recent defectors from the GOP announced their support Wednesday for Democratic U. S. Senate candidate Barbara Boxer, largely because they said Boxer’s Republican opponent Bruce Herschensohn is too conservative for them.

The speakers blasted Herschensohn as being out of touch with the times, with his position of opposing abortion and taxation and his embrace of other conservative causes.

Heather Levins August, a Ventura homemaker and newsletter editor, said she was supporting a Democratic candidate “for the first time in my life.” She is supporting Boxer, she said, because Boxer has “been asking people what they think,” whereas Herschensohn has been telling people “what to think.”

She also voiced dismay with the Republican Party platform as going “against everything I was ever taught, everything I believe in.”

Marlene Alexander of Thousand Oaks, a Republican and a Conejo Valley activist supporting Boxer, said she has been an abortion rights supporter since 1969.

“I didn’t know at that time that being a Republican and pro-choice could be mutually exclusive,” she said.

Boxer favors abortion rights, while Herschensohn believes that abortion is morally wrong and should be permitted only in instances of rape, incest or when a pregnancy puts a woman’s life in danger.

Jackie Niland, 72, of Ventura, who said she has been a staunch Republican since voting for Thomas Dewey for President in 1948, took the occasion to disclose that she has switched parties.

“I’m a born-again Democrat,” she pronounced Thursday. “I couldn’t take that plank in the Republican platform,” Niland said, referring to the party’s position on abortion.

The group of endorsements was arranged by Karen Anderson Moore, 36, of Ventura, a veterinarian and lifelong Republican.

“The Republican Party is no longer speaking our language,” she told the group. “The platform is extraordinarily restricted and narrow-minded and it offends me.”