Democrats Enjoying Big Lead Among California’s Swing Voters : Frustrated by the economy, many Reagan Democrats and moderate Republicans are looking to Clinton for change.

“In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 18th-Century poet

Truck driver Don Anderson of Norwalk is President Bush’s nightmare--and Bill Clinton’s dream come true.

He is a “Reagan Democrat,” a member of the most chronicled and celebrated “swing voter” group of the 1980 and ’84 presidential elections. He also is a Bush Democrat, having crossed party lines to vote Republican again in 1988.

But this fall, Anderson is swinging back to his own party and planning to vote for Clinton, as are several hundred thousand other Reagan Democrats in California, according to the polls.

The state’s political pendulum is taking a wide swing from right to left, all of the surveys show, and as it does one can easily watch the voters who are swinging it. They are everywhere, from Norwalk to Napa, from San Bernardino to San Jose.

One example is Anderson, who--like many millions this year--is an angry voter.

“I’m tired of this,” he told The Times, adding an expletive. “They promise ya the goddamn world and don’t give ya nothing. I mean, goddamn! Life’s going to hell in a handbasket. . . . We need a change. We can’t just keep sticking with the same ol’ crowd. How long’s it take to do something?”

Anderson, 47, drives an 18-wheeler--”as big as they get”--while his wife tries to sell real estate. “That’s another thing: The bottom’s fallen out of the real estate market,” he said. “Maybe Clinton can do something.”

Mike McMillin of Carson is another Reagan Democrat who has soured on the GOP nationally and is siding with Clinton. A 32-year-old unemployed ship worker, McMillin said he voted for Bush in 1988 because “with him coming after Reagan, I thought he was going to be good. . . . But now we’re just hurting so bad.”

Personal stories such as these have added up to a landslide-size lead for Clinton in California--21 percentage points in both an early October survey by The Field Poll and a mid-September canvas by The Times Poll.

Bush has never enjoyed a particularly strong following in California. He has no direct ties here, unlike Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon, who were on the Republican ticket seven times as the party carried the state in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. In 1988, Bush won California by 3.5 percentage points, which was less than half of his national margin.

Compounding the President’s shallow support here is the state’s stubborn recession: California’s unemployment rate is almost two points higher than the national figure of 7.5%.

The result is that not only Reagan Democrats, but substantial numbers of Republican moderates are deserting the GOP ticket, according to the polls.

The apparent lopsidedness of the California contest has prompted both Clinton and Bush to virtually ignore the state, even if it does contain the nation’s largest bloc of electoral votes--54, one-fifth of the 270 needed to win the presidency. The private thinking in both camps is that Clinton has all but locked up California, so any major commitments of candidate time or television advertising money would be a waste of resources that better could be used in more competitive states.

“It’s the last time I’ll do a campaign like this,” said one Bush strategist in California. “I literally feel like the Maytag salesman waiting for the phone to ring (from national headquarters). It never does.”

Bush has campaigned only once in California since the August Republican National Convention--for two days in mid-September--and there are no firm plans for him to return before the Nov. 3 vote. There has been only one Bush TV buy solely for California and that was during the GOP convention. All other Bush ads seen here have been part of national buys.

“The mood? It’s not great,” conceded James Lee, spokesman for the California Bush campaign. The challenge now is to resist resigning to defeat and to keep the troops fighting until Election Day, he said.

In the Clinton campaign, the challenge is just the opposite--to avoid being lulled into complacency. And that is the main purpose of Clinton’s planned stop in Orange County this evening, his first trip to the state since mid-September.

Until today, the Democratic nominee had been to California only three times, totaling eight days, since the party’s convention in July. And no Clinton TV ad has been aimed specifically at California voters.

“This is the very last thing we expected,” said Jay Zieger, the Clinton campaign spokesman in California. “We really thought it would be a dogfight.”

Nevertheless, both sides have been waging an all-out “ground war” behind the scenes--registering voters, distributing absentee ballots, contacting potential supporters by telephone and mail and preparing to coax these citizens to the ballot booths on Election Day. All of this is aimed at promoting not just the presidential candidates, but each party’s entire ticket in California, including U.S. Senate, House and state legislative contenders.

Clinton strategists are targeting roughly 400,000 California Democrats they define as “occasional voters.” These people were found by culling the registration rolls to see who had failed to vote in November, 1990, and in this year’s primary. The assumption is that, if they can be prodded to the polls on Nov. 3, they will vote Democratic.

“If you were registered in ’88 and haven’t voted since, we’re going after you,” said a Clinton operative.

But Reagan Democrats and other swing voters are not prime targets of Clinton’s California ground troops. The theory, supported by polls, is that these voters have been drifting toward the Democratic candidate on their own. “Clinton’s going to get the swing vote himself,” predicted Bob Mulholland, political director for the California Democratic Party.

Indeed, the most recent Times Poll in California found that nearly two-thirds of the Reagan Democrats were siding with Clinton. And of the rest, independent Ross Perot was attracting more than Bush.

“I haven’t seen a damn thing that Bush has done,” said Carol Simpson, 40, of Huntington Beach, a Democrat who previously voted for Reagan and Bush and now is leaning strongly toward Clinton.

Simpson, a customer service representative for an electrical component firm competing against Japanese products, said, “I’m not crazy about how (the Republicans) have let foreign trade come into this country.” She added, echoing a basic Democratic theme: “It’s time we started taking care of our own country and stopped taking care of others.”

Contrary to the last six presidential elections, the California GOP also has been watching a significant portion of its voter base shift toward the Democratic ticket. The Times Poll showed that only 56% of registered Republicans were supporting the President. The rest were dividing almost evenly between Clinton and Perot.

“We should be getting 85% of the Republicans,” said a key Bush adviser in California.

Mary Ericson, 40, of San Bernardino, is one of the disenchanted Republicans that Bush is losing to Clinton. “We need somebody new,” she asserted.

Ericson’s family owns a tire business that, like many small firms, is suffering. “When the recession started, Bush wasn’t real concerned about the little people,” she charged. “As long as the rich got richer, if the little people had to close their shops, that was OK.”

In San Jose, Rusty McNiff, 35, is a Republican who is undecided. “I’m still very, very confused,” she said.

McNiff voted for Bush in 1988 but, she asserted, “He hasn’t done anything. And that concerns me.” Like Ericson, McNiff’s family owns a small business, an auto parts store. “We’re dying and we shouldn’t be,” she said. “Whenever we get our head above water, we’re taxed to death. We’re barely surviving.” So the prospect of another tax increase also concerns her about Clinton.

It is because of the many Republicans like Ericson and McNiff that Bush’s ground troops in California--unlike Clinton’s--have been targeting swing voters, especially GOP business professionals who might be persuaded to fear a potential Clinton tax hike. The President’s operatives realize that they must halt the erosion of the Republican base and rebuild it.

“Usually, you don’t have to spend a lot of time with Republicans,” lamented a Bush strategist.

Observed John R. Petrocik, a UCLA political science professor and veteran pollster for GOP campaigns: “The two groups Republicans need in any election are ‘Mugwumps’ and ‘New Collars.’ ”

Mugwumps are Republicans, but not rock-ribbed loyalists. They are the voters who abandoned conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 and contributed to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide. They generally are upscale Anglos and live in such places as Pasadena, Chatsworth, Encino and Irvine, according to Petrocik.

“They’re a variation of Brie-and-Chablis liberals,” he said. “They believe in good government. . . . They are the kind of Republicans Bush is having trouble with, the kind who take off (and swing Democrat).”

Mugwump is an old term popularized in the 1884 election to characterize the Republicans who bolted from GOP nominee James Blaine. New Collar, on the other hand, is a term of recent vintage composed in academia to describe--as Petrocik put it--”people who just got their collar,” often blue.

He added: “They are socially conservative. They don’t like kowtowing to feminists. They don’t understand why blacks act that way. They think they deserve a $5,000 write-off on their income tax and don’t see that as welfare. They come out of the Democratic tradition, but moved to Republican. . . . We think of them as Reagan Democrats, but they’ve been around for years.”

In California this year, Bush may not even be holding half of the Mugwumps, according to polls. And New Collars seem to be solidly supporting Clinton.

At Claremont McKenna College, assistant government professor John J. Pitney Jr., a former research director for the Republican National Committee, described Reagan Democrats as “the sons and daughters of Truman Democrats, which makes sense because Reagan was a Truman Democrat. Reagan could connect with working people in a way that Bush has difficulty doing.”

“These are the people,” Pitney continued, “who suffer on the 10 Freeway.”

In fact, the I-10 straddles one of the state’s biggest enclaves of Reagan Democrats, the City of San Bernardino. Despite a big Democratic registration advantage, the city narrowly backed Reagan in 1984. But four years later, it rejected Bush and edged back into the Democratic column with Michael S. Dukakis. By all indications, that swing is continuing this fall, with Democrats flocking to Clinton in large numbers.

Other major pockets of Reagan Democrats--in order of Democratic registration dominance--are the cities of Norwalk, South Gate, Baldwin Park, Monterey Park and El Monte, according to data produced by The Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna.

“Call it the Bubba Vote,” said George Burden, the San Bernardino field coordinator for Clinton. “They’re the people who used to work at Kaiser Steel--now closed--and aerospace workers; the mechanics, not the engineers.”

Burden, whose family mines pumice in northeastern California, said: “The left-wingers made us Reagan Democrats. I’ll be honest with you, I voted for Reagan the first time. You had a party that just represented the liberal coast, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. Now it’s coming back inland.”