Congress Races Being Run on Road Full of Potholes : Politics: An unheard-of number of women, Latinos and newcomers are competing for 52 seats in California.

Spring, 1991: The Gulf War was over and George Bush was more popular than Uncle Sam; after years of living on a Democratic map, California Republicans were redrawing congressional districts more to their liking; a Republican governor presided in Sacramento once again.

And GOP House candidates expected to reap the harvest of all that, come Election ’92.

Then came the House banking scandal, the California recession, Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas, the stampede for term limits, and the abortion issue--again. Suddenly, incumbents were being savaged left and right, and President Bush’s coattails looked more like a halter top.

Now that fall is here, with 52 House seats at stake in California--the biggest delegation any state has ever fielded--the political landscape has changed dramatically.

Unheard-of numbers of women, Latinos and political newcomers are running for many of those seats. For the first time in 16 years, Democratic registration in California is rising as the GOP’s is falling. “Safe” congressional seats in both parties are looking shaky, and some long shots may be closing the odds.

With so much at stake--no less than 12% of the House of Representatives--both national parties and many special interests are spending quality time and money to mold the California delegation in their images.

And although at least half of the 52 winners will probably be the same people who went to Congress in 1990, 15 seats stand empty--seven newly minted, eight vacated by incumbents. In at least five more, incumbents look vulnerable. Races that would have been easy to call last year are a mystery.

A rule of thumb says it takes 56% Democratic registration to make a safe Democratic district, but only 43% GOP to make a Republican one because Republicans are historically more assiduous about getting out the vote.

Remapping shoved some Democratic incumbents into GOP-heavy districts. Anti-incumbent venom, GOP voter loyalty and the support of Reagan Democrats ought to be boosting Republicans this fall.

Republicans this year are also counting on a kind of trickle-up effect, said state GOP Chairman Jim Dignan. They expect that newly redrawn Assembly and state Senate districts, where many races are being vigorously waged up and down the state, will get out the vote for local GOP candidates. “These races will have a narrowing effect on the . . . races at the top of the ticket,” Dignan said.

He expects the GOP to pull a minimum 26 or 27 of the 52 seats, and if dreams come true, 29 seats. But his dream may have become more fitful.

Of the more than 500,000 new voters who have registered since May, more than 52% signed as Democrats, and those who did not registered as independents or with minor parties more often than they registered Republican. In 44 of the 52 congressional districts, GOP registration has dropped by at least one point since February.

State Democratic Party officials said they put as much as $1.5 million into voter registration over the last year. “If the political climate did change, we needed to have our forces out there to take advantage of it,” Chairman Phil Angelides said. “And that’s very much what happened this year, as disenchantment with Republicans went through the ceiling.”

Democrats are also banking on Bill Clinton’s strength, on voter fury over the economy, as well as disgust over gender and family values divisiveness.

Conservative Republicans who beat out moderates in the primaries are getting support from like-minded groups--and getting nailed by their opponents on hot-button matters such as abortion.

Whenever they lost big races in the past, said Angelides, “the Democrats bitched that we could have done it with better candidates, and the Republicans bitched that they could have done it with reapportionment.”

This year, both may have gotten their wish.

Remapping of district boundaries more to the Republicans liking means “we’re clearly going to do better than we otherwise would have,” said GOP consultant Steve Merksamer, “ . . . but because Clinton is doing so much better than the President out here, that’s going to diminish how well we would have done--the extent to which remains to be seen.”

In the biggest-stakes race, redistricting has changed the numbers for Democrat Vic Fazio’s 3rd Congressional District in the Sacramento Delta. Two years ago, 52% of the district was Democratic and 37% Republican; now it’s 48% vs. 39%.

Fazio is California’s No. 1 man on the Hill, on the fast track to Democratic leadership, and the GOP’s No. 1 target here. “They’re clearly trying to target their resources on somebody they see as up and coming in the leadership,” said Les Francis, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They want to cause us pain.”

Fazio, a top fund-raiser seeking his eighth term, is up against H.L. Richardson, and the best weapon each says it has is the other guy.

Fazio, who scored points for saving McClellan Air Force Base and its 13,000 civilian jobs, is taking hits for his role in congressional pay raises. Richardson’s people call him “the prince of perks” and “mayor of Capitol Hill.”

Richard Harris, Fazio’s campaign manager, said: “One of our biggest advantages is their candidate. He’s an extremist.”

Richardson, who represented Glendora in the state Senate for 22 years, is anti-abortion, anti-gun control--he founded Gun Owners of America--and has help from Oliver North and Christian fundamentalist groups.

A similar matchup can be found in the San Fernando Valley. Redistricting nudged Democratic incumbent Anthony C. Beilenson, a veteran liberal, out of the Westside and into a new Republican-leaning district against conservative Assemblyman Tom McClintock, the GOP’S foremost budget critic in Sacramento.

Both parties have money and hope in this race; it offers real ideological choices, as Beilenson and McClintock have sharply different stances on abortion, gun control and other issues. As in the Fazio-Richardson race, each side argues that the other is too extreme for the new district.

In many races statewide, the truism about conservatives doing better in primaries than in general elections is getting a big test. A number of rock-ribbed conservatives are running for Congress, often with the help of anti-abortion, anti-tax and anti-gun control groups and the religious right.

In the 10th Congressional District in the East Bay area, six-term Republican Assemblyman Bill Baker is again running against Democratic small business owner Wendell Williams. Republican write-in David Williams could rattle cages on both sides.

Baker has $700,000 to spend, thanks to friends such as Jack Kemp, who spoke at a fund-raiser on his behalf. At last report the Democrat was $25,000 in the hole.

But Tom Reitter, a Livermore city councilman and head of Republicans for Williams, says Baker “has been an embarrassment for years. . . . Baker is anti-choice, hostile to public schools, and everything he does is for the rich.” Democrats are making the most of Baker references to welfare mothers as “breeders” and to 17 schoolchildren as “survivors of abortion.”

In the 11th Congressional District south of Sacramento, Patricia Garamendi, a pro-choice Democrat and wife of the state insurance commissioner, lost two elections in two years for Assembly and state Senate, but is taking on conservative newcomer Richard Pombo in a conservative Democratic district where unemployment nears 16%.

Garamendi is supported by women’s political groups. Pombo, a rancher supported by agribusiness, is benefiting from national Republican coffers and got Dan Quayle’s help.

At the other end of the state, the “Year of the Woman” will mean that literally in the 49th Congressional District. The winner will be the first woman that San Diego County has sent to Congress, but apart from abortion, the issues are classic liberal-conservative.

Republican Judy Jarvis, a nurse who was an upset winner in a 10-candidate GOP primary, has flaunted her political outsider status, saying she “breaks the mold of both parties.”

Democrat Lynn Schenk, a lawyer who served in the Cabinet of former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., is a longtime Democratic activist on the San Diego Unified Port Commission.

Both are pro-choice, but break along party lines on a waiting period for gun purchases, gay rights legislation and the school voucher proposal. “When you get beyond gender, there are clear differences,” Schenk said.

And in the newly drawn South Bay 36th Congressional District, another liberal-conservative race will put a woman in Congress--Republican Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores or Democratic attorney Jane Harman.

The South Bay’s struggling defense-based economy and more liberal cities in the district may change the odds, which have favored Flores. Each candidate is spending plenty to persuade voters that she can rescue the stumbling economy: Harman, who used nearly $250,000 of her own money in the primary, has gotten hefty sums from abortion rights groups and Washington attorneys; Flores has strong backing from Los Angeles business and harbor interests and anti-abortion groups.

All those empty seats have brought out new people, Republican and Democratic, mavericks often outside the party mainstream.

In the 1st Congressional District, first-termer Frank Riggs, one of three Republicans to vote against the Gulf War, wants to get reelected to the seat he won from a Democrat in 1990 in part because the Peace and Freedom candidate drew 15% of the Democratic vote.

Democrats hope to take back this timber-country district where jobs, environment and military cutbacks matter. Democrat Dan Hamburg, an unemployed former Mendocino County supervisor endorsed by the National Education Assn. and the Sierra Club, raised $500,000 with the support of the California Abortion Rights Action League, and his friend, rock balladeer Bonnie Raitt.

In the Mother Lode country, another feisty freshman congressman, John Doolittle, one of the Gang of Seven who stirred up the checks scandal, is getting a fight from Democrat Patricia Malberg, who in 1990 pulled 49% of the vote in this Republican district and also has the support of the national women’s PAC, EMILY’s List. Both are styling themselves as Perot-type insurgents. But even one-term incumbency may tar Doolittle.

Down the Santa Barbara coast is a first-time candidate in the 22nd Congressional District who, as of June, had $3.5 million to campaign with, more money than any member of the House of Representatives, virtually all of it his own.

Millionaire Republican businessman Michael Huffington bucked his own party, ignored White House pleas and beat longtime Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino in June; now he is taking on Democrat Gloria Ochoa, a Santa Barbara county supervisor.

Both are moderate abortion rights advocates, and much of the outcome depends on whether Ochoa and her grass-roots campaign, supported by many women and Latinos, can persuade voters to reject Huffington’s high-priced, high-profile campaign in this Republican-leaning district.

Interestingly, in a race that the White House never wanted him to run, in a state where Bush is trailing, Huffington’s ads show him being endorsed by Barbara--but not George--Bush.

In several races, political unknowns are threatening to topple Democratic incumbents.

In the Inland Empire, Democrat George E. Brown Jr., a liberal fixture in the House since John F. Kennedy was President, might as well be wearing a big I (for Incumbent) on his chest. He faces three obstacles to his 15th term: a redrawn district, anti-incumbent fury and a Republican challenger with money and folk-hero appeal.

Brown is pressing an agenda of space and science, jobs and job retraining--and the seniority that gives him the oomph to make them happen.

But opponent Dick Rutan is a plain-spoken, former Vietnam War fighter pilot best known for flying a homemade plane around the globe without refueling in 1986.

It is an expensive contest, with Republicans hoping to topple Brown at last. Rutan wants to raise $500,000 by Election Day, and Brown expects to spend about $850,000.

In the Fresno area, in a once-Democratic district with new GOP life breathed into it by redistricting, five-term incumbent Rick Lehman is getting a run for his money--and he has a lot of it--from Tal Cloud, a 28-year-old moderate Republican, a USC graduate who runs a paper conversion company with his mother. Cloud has raised less than 10% of the money that Lehman has, but has been written up in the Wall Street Journal.

In “the Year of the Woman,” 19 woman are running for the House from California: 17 Democrats and two Republicans. At minimum, six women will be elected to Congress, and perhaps as many as 10--compared to three in 1990.

Besides Malberg, Ochoa, Garamendi, Flores-Harman and Jarvis-Schenck, a few hot races:

In the Bay Area, the 14th Congressional District, which sent moderate Republican Tom Campbell to Congress, is now even more Democratic, favoring Anna Eshoo, who barely lost to Campbell two years ago. This time, her opposition is Tom Huening.

Both are San Mateo County supervisors, both are pro-choice, but in a district where gender matters, Huening is being labeled as another “boring white male.” But he can also boast the support of popular state Sen. Becky Morgan. Huening, who expects to spend about $850,000, has called Eshoo an insider for her support from congressional Democratic leaders. Both see themselves as candidates for change, and both have courted Perot supporters.

In Ventura County, which has not sent a Democrat to Congress in half a century, Anita Perez Ferguson may stage a triple: to break that record, to be the second California Latina in Congress, and to beat three-term incumbent Republican Elton Gallegly.

Both parties’ polls show her running even with Gallegly in the redrawn 23rd Congressional District, where a Democratic registration drive has pulled in many new voters.

Gallegly was moved out of his Republican stronghold of Thousand Oaks into the more Democratic and Latino city of Oxnard. He has $400,000 to spend against Perez Ferguson.

Saying she does not want to use her Latino roots to woo ethnic votes, she has dropped “Perez” from her radio ads, to the disdain of Latino activists. But Gallegly has not endeared himself to Latinos with his push for illegal immigration controls, a program that some Latinos have branded as racist.

And in the Bay Area’s 6th Congressional District, Democrat Lynn Woolsey is expected to win against seven-term Republican Assemblyman Bill Filante, who has a malignant brain tumor. Woolsey could be the first ex-welfare mother in Congress.

Minority candidates are poised to do well this fall.

The 41st Congressional District may be the first to send a Korean-American to Congress--Republican Diamond Bar Mayor Jay Kim, who has a big registration advantage and lots of his own money. He is running against Democrat Bob Baker.

Two Latino newcomers can probably spend this month packing their bags--Stanford-trained lawyer Xavier Becerra, whose real battle was in a tough primary field, and Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, daughter of retiring Rep. Edward R. Roybal. Both have a virtual walk to victory in heavily Democratic Los Angeles districts.

The House check-writing scandal has hurt some members of Congress but left others unscathed.

Among the worst offenders was 11-term Bay Area Democrat Ronald V. Dellums, but in spite of 851 overdrafts he has no Republican opponent.

In San Diego and Imperial counties, six-term Rep. Duncan Hunter is feeling some heat from Democrat Janet Gastil over his 407 overdrafts totaling $129,225.

A conservative’s conservative, Hunter, who won his primary easily, went around the district with his checks to explain them to any voter who asked. Gastil has made it part of her low-budget campaign, and what should have been a routine reelection is a bit more uncertain.

San Diego Republican Rep. Bill Lowery dropped out rather than face having the overdrafts issue thrown into his face repeatedly.

THE RACES: A graphic look at the shape of the 52 campaigns. A22