‘92 POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE : Grass Roots Pushing for Victory 1 Vote at a Time : Campaigns’ TV advertising gets more money, attention. But volunteers can make a difference in a close race.

Like war, political campaigns are fought in the air and on the ground.

The air war, television advertising, gets vastly more money and attention. The ground war is waged by thousands of unsung staffers, paid and unpaid--the grass roots. They measure their victories one voter at a time.

The headquarters for the state Democratic Party’s northern forays is a converted home where organizer Larry Tramutola recently lectured a few of his paid staffers about their assignments.

It’s simple, he said: Find voters who support Bill Clinton and make sure they vote. The most important targets, he said, are those who might not make it to the polls without a little encouragement.

The nine staff members clutching clipboards and sitting on folding chairs were responsible for more than two dozen campaign offices and an army of volunteers.

Their search for those lukewarm supporters means hours of late-night and weekend work, knocking on doors, sitting in shopping malls, passing out flyers, even waving signs at commuters.

The biggest job is the telephone banks, which have to reach several hundred thousand Democrats--one by one--to find those who are definite Clinton votes. On Election Day, the campaign moves heaven and earth to get them to the polls.

Otherwise, Tramutola said, “If they’re dead or if they’ve moved or if they’re for (President) Bush, they’re in the same category for us.”

In storefronts and offices throughout California, Democrats and Republicans alike are gearing up their volunteers for a ground assault. Ross Perot’s legions fanned out months ago, gathering more than a million signatures--far more than the required 134,781--to place him on the ballot as an independent. His supporters are in the process of recalling their volunteers and developing a grass-roots strategy.

Statewide, each party’s volunteer base is expected to grow to at least 25,000 by Election Day--half of the 50,000 workers Perot had at the peak of his effort. Experts say that if everything works--all of the signs and bumper stickers and phone calls and brochures and rallies--the grass-roots campaign can generate an additional 3 percentage points in the election tally for the candidate.

Theoretically, that could have made up the difference in Dianne Feinstein’s 3-point loss to Pete Wilson in the 1990 governor’s race.

“It looks like a lot of tedious and boring work, and it is,” said Kevin Brown, a college-age Republican who was preparing campaign letters one afternoon at GOP headquarters in Sacramento. “But every envelope I put a stamp on makes a little difference. I believe in the candidate, and you want things you believe in to be heard.”

Perot’s campaign has maintained five headquarters throughout California during the summer. Spokesman Bob Reid said he expects that the campaign will organize rallies, but the focus of the national strategy is likely to be on television commercials or talk shows.

Perot will have fewer volunteers this time around, Reid said. “But we don’t need as many as we had before, because then they were out there collecting signatures.”

Most of the attention in a campaign is on television advertising--the air war. That’s especially true in a state as large and diverse as California, where some strategists even joke that “California grass roots” might be an oxymoron.

“We have one of the highest rates of unlisted (phone) numbers in the country; we have urban environments where people are not willing to accept somebody knocking on their door; we have a very mobile population and we have huge chunks of the state that are rural,” said Sal Russo, a Republican political consultant in Sacramento. “That is why California is the quintessential media state.”

Despite the difficulties of organizing voters in California as well as the seemingly small benefit, strategists for the Democratic and Republican parties predict that this year’s presidential race will generate one of the most aggressive grass-roots efforts in years.

“Volunteer activities in this campaign are probably going to be more important than in any statewide campaign in the last 25 years,” said Jack Flanigan, co-director of the California campaign for Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle.

“The point is, we don’t have the financial resources to saturate California” with television commercials, he said. “On the other hand, we believe there is a strong Republican core out there who, if motivated, can be a real asset.”

Buoyed by polls showing Clinton with a strong lead, state Democratic Party Chairman Phil Angelides said his volunteers also are hard at work.

“Before it is all over, this will be the biggest grass-roots effort in decades,” Angelides said. “It looks as though, for the first time in 16 years, we will have out-registered the Republicans all year. That is the result of the enthusiasm for Clinton, but it’s also because we worked our fannies off.”

The latest registration figures indicate that Democrats have slightly improved their registration numbers since May. As of Sept. 4, they represent 48.6% of the state’s registered voters to the GOP’s 37.9%. But that gap is narrower than it was in 1988, when the Democrats held a 50.4% to 38.6% lead. Oct. 5 was the last day to register.

The GOP enjoys a reputation as the party with the most effective organization. But this year, Bush’s sagging support has been reflected by a drop in the grass-roots enthusiasm Republicans had for Ronald Reagan’s elections in 1980 and 1984. Flanigan acknowledged that many Republican activists this year are motivated as much by their fear of Clinton as by support for Bush.

That, and anger. “Bush has been so beat up and it has been so unfair,” said Ozzie Cannon, a retired insurance company chairman who is a volunteer in Orange County. “I just thought whatever I could contribute, I would.”

Some GOP leaders said volunteers operating on negative motivation--fear or anger--are not as effective as those inspired by a leader.

“There doesn’t seem to be any fire in anybody’s belly,” said Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), who supports Bush. “It doesn’t take a political expert to know the President’s chance of winning in California are slim.”