GOP Loses 2 Assembly Seats Despite Remap

After complaining for a decade that unfairly drawn political districts had robbed them of a chance to take control of the state Assembly, Republicans this year were handed boundaries that they boasted would give them an even shot to capture the Legislature’s lower house for the first time since 1970.

But the GOP dream of ousting Assembly Speaker Willie Brown slipped away early Wednesday when unofficial election returns showed Democrats not losing seats but gaining two, leaving the majority party with a 49-31 edge in the 80-member Assembly.

Aided by Bill Clinton’s coattails and a number of strong women candidates, Democrats managed to protect all 34 of their incumbents while knocking off three of the 21 GOP lawmakers seeking reelection.

In the contest for 25 open seats, Republicans won 13 and Democrats took 12. But most of the GOP wins came in districts so solidly Republican that their victories were never in doubt. Democrats prevailed in most of the districts where the outcome could not have been predicted.

The results prompted Assembly Republican Leader Bill Jones of Fresno, a strong ally of Gov. Pete Wilson, to announce that he would not seek another term as GOP leader. It appeared certain that Jones would be replaced today by a leader more acceptable to conservatives, who blamed Wilson and Jones for mismanaging the Republican campaign effort.

Brown, speaking to reporters at the Capitol, said Wilson was the big loser Tuesday. The governor, he said, last year vetoed three separate Democratic plans for redrawing the districts to reflect population shifts recorded in the 1990 Census, handing the map-drawing job to the state Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republican appointees.

Once the new districts were in hand and Wilson declared himself satisfied, the governor played hardball with the Legislature on the state budget and the workers’ compensation issue, using the threat of electoral defeat as a weapon to try to wring concessions out of Democratic lawmakers. But Wilson failed to deliver.

“It was not exactly a good evening” for Wilson, Brown said.

Brown and other Democrats said an aggressive voter registration drive and the party’s new willingness--born of necessity--to fight for districts they once would have ceded to Republicans positioned the Democrats for a big win on Election Day.

Three Republican incumbents--Gerald N. Felando of San Pedro, Tricia Hunter of Bonita and Dean Andal of Stockton--were defeated, although Democrat Michael Machado’s narrow victory over Andal will be in doubt until all the absentee ballots are counted. Hunter’s opponent, lawyer and community college trustee Julie Bornstein, successfully tarred the incumbent as a tool of Wilson.

The biggest surprise was Felando, a veteran lawmaker who was not expected to face a tough race but lost to Democrat Betty Karnette, a teacher who got last-minute support from the California Teachers Assn. Ironically, Karnette may have been aided by a last-minute mailer she sent to GOP voters criticizing Felando for his cozy relationship with Brown.

In three crucial races for open seats, Democrats upset Republican candidates who had strong support from conservative organizations--including the religious right, gun owners and anti-abortion groups--and were expected to win.

In the 53rd District along the Los Angeles County coast, Democrat Debra Bowen, a lawyer, defeated Republican Brad Parton. In the 77th District in San Diego, Democrat Thomas Connolly, also an attorney, beat Republican Steven C. Baldwin. And in the 25th District in the San Joaquin Valley, Democrat Margaret Snyder, a Modesto school board member, defeated Republican Barbara Keating-Edh.

Democrats also picked up open seats with the victories of Vivien Bronshvag and Valerie Brown in the 6th and 7th districts north of San Francisco Bay--two seats the Republicans had hoped they might win until Democrats registered thousands more voters and put the districts out of the reach of the GOP.

In one measure of what a solid Democratic year it was, Democrats won three seats in districts where their party’s voters were outnumbered by Republicans, a feat unheard of until 1990, when Democrat Dede Alpert beat an unpopular GOP incumbent to win a San Diego County seat. On Tuesday, Alpert won her reelection bid and two other San Diego County Democrats--Connolly and incumbent Mike Gotch--also secured victories in districts with a plurality of Republican voters.

Allan Hoffenblum, Felando’s political consultant, said a third of the Republicans in the area from Long Beach to Westchester, hit hard by aerospace industry layoffs, failed to vote for President Bush. He said Felando had hoped those voters would turn back to the party at the bottom of the ticket, but they didn’t.

He said moderate to liberal Republican women in particular deserted the ticket in droves. They “kicked the Republicans in the ass,” Hoffenblum said.

Republicans gathering in Sacramento to assess their losses were stunned.

Assemblyman David Knowles of Cameron Park said he felt like “someone on a sidewalk after a gang of thugs beat them up. We’ve been rolled.” Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of Newport Beach said the results were “a debacle.”

Two bright spots for the GOP among the heavily contested races were the apparent victory of Ted Weggeland in the 64th District, based in Riverside, and conservative Larry Bowler’s resounding win in the 10th District south of Sacramento.

Republicans, as expected, also won races in nine open seats where the voter registration heavily favored the GOP. In almost all of those races, the Republican winners were conservatives who will tilt the Assembly Republican caucus to the right, costing Jones his job as leader and possibly making life more difficult for Wilson, whose positions on abortion, the environment and many other issues are at odds with the new majority in the caucus.

Former Assembly Republican Leader Pat Nolan of Glendale, a leading conservative, said some GOP candidates who lost might have been able to survive Clinton’s big win in the state had Wilson not poured several million dollars into Proposition 165, the governor’s attempt to cut welfare and take some budget powers from the Legislature.

“I’m frustrated that money that normally would have been directed into the state party for party-building activities such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote and absentee ballot follow-up instead was diverted into a losing proposition,” Nolan said.

Despite the outcome, Republicans held out hope that they could regroup and build a majority in 1994, when, they predicted, several Democrats who took marginal districts Tuesday will lose them to GOP candidates.

“There is a kind of unity that comes to a party that has taken this kind of beating,” Wilson said.

Weintraub reported from Los Angeles and Gladstone from Sacramento. Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino contributed to this story.