It Was Year of the Political Upset in S.D. : Election: Only time will tell if upsets at the voting booth were flukes or indicate fundamental changes in the political landscape of the county.

Several years ago, political consultant Nick Johnson half-jokingly described San Diego County elections as “about as unpredictable as elections in Russia.”

“In most races here, you can just look at who’s got the ‘R’ after his name and say, ‘Well, there’s your winner,’ ” Johnson said, referring to the GOP’s history of overwhelming success in local, state and national elections in strongly Republican San Diego. “To be a Republican here is . . . like being on the Communist Party ticket in East Germany or Russia.”

Johnson’s comment was made shortly before communism fell to democratic reforms that swept through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In San Diego, Campaign ’92 was a season of equally dramatic, if less momentous, political transformation:

* Bill Clinton became the Democrats’ first presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt half a century ago to carry San Diego County.

* San Diegans elected their first woman to Congress, sent two Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time ever, and elected two women to the five-member Board of Supervisors for the first time in its 140-year history.

* Several victors in congressional and state legislative races won in districts where the opposition party held an edge in voter registration. And several incumbents who had been viewed as politically untouchable received scares that could portend future difficulties.

“This was a fundamentally different election from any we’ve had in years, both nationally and in San Diego,” said UC San Diego political scientist Sam Popkin, who served as an adviser to Clinton’s campaign. “In the 18 years I’ve lived here, this is the first campaign I’ve seen the Republicans in such disarray and the Democrats have so much success and so many opportunities.”

Within local political circles, much of the post-election analysis has focused on whether Nov. 3 represented an aberrant blip on the political radar screen or signaled the beginning of a partisan realignment that could alter the region’s reputation as a dependable Republican haven.

“As San Diego becomes more diverse, it could be that we’re turning into a more competitive two-party city,” said former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock. “Some of the results this year would certainly suggest that. There’s a new point on the graph, but it’s too early to tell which way the line will go.”

Like most other political observers, Hedgecock cautions that only the passage of several more elections can answer the question of whether 1992 was a fluke born of unusual economic and electoral dynamics or was the first chapter in the rewriting of San Diego’s political history.

“This election posed the question, and ’94 and ’96 will give us some of the answers,” campaign consultant David Lewis said. “But this election really shook things up. Things that used to be taken for granted about San Diego politics don’t seem so certain anymore.”

Explanations for local Democrats’ unusually strong showing at the polls this month begin with the economic problems and strategic debacles that combined to produce what Kevin Parriott, executive director of the San Diego County Republican Party, called the GOP’s “most amateurish, inexcusably bad campaign” in California in decades.

Although California’s 54 electoral votes represented one-fifth of the total needed for his reelection, President Bush effectively conceded the state to Clinton after the Democratic nominee racked up a double-digit lead in mid-summer polls.

By failing to mount a serious campaign in the state, the Bush-Quayle team saddled local Republicans with daunting organizational and financial problems. While some Republicans initially hoped that Bush’s inactivity would leave more volunteers and money to be divided among local candidates, it had the opposite effect by discouraging potential donors and workers.

“When the top of the ticket folds its hand in mid-August, it’s pretty difficult to get anyone excited about the races lower on the ballot,” consultant Lewis explained. “You can’t even say the Republicans were complacent. They just weren’t there, period.”

In the 49th Congressional District, for example, Republican Judy Jarvis was heavily outspent by her Democratic rival, Lynn Schenk, despite a 43%-39% GOP registration advantage in the largely northwestern San Diego district.

That financial disparity contributed to Schenk’s comfortable 9-percentage-point victory in an historic race that saw San Diego elect its first woman ever to Congress. There, she will be joined by newly elected Rep. Bob Filner, giving San Diego two Democrats in the House--out of a five-member delegation--for the first time ever, a potentially significant asset for the city given Democrats’ control of the White House and Congress.

Similar fund-raising difficulties prevented Jeff Marston, the Republican nominee in the 78th Assembly District, from receiving promised financial assistance from GOP leaders in Sacramento until the race’s closing days.

That helped catapult Democratic Assemblywoman Deirdre (Dede) Alpert, whose seat was considered in jeopardy because of Republicans’ usually safe 6-percentage-point registration edge, to a stunning 12-percentage-point victory over Marston.

While a more active Bush campaign still might have salvaged Jarvis’ or Marston’s candidacies, it could have influenced the outcome in the 77th Assembly District, where Democrat Tom Connolly upset Republican Steve Baldwin by 3 percentage points in what had been considered a secure GOP district.

During that race’s final week, Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista) persuaded Speaker Willie Brown to pour more than $100,000 into Connolly’s campaign against a much better known, better financed opponent who was nonetheless vulnerable because of his strong ties to the so-called Christian Right movement. On Election Day, the Democratic Party also provided 200 workers to get out the vote--a strong and savvy commitment of resources in a race that, at the outset, was widely viewed as a lost cause.

“In the past, the Republicans were the ones with the money, the organization and the talented people who knew what you needed to do to win elections,” consultant Lewis said. “This time, the Democrats made the right moves.”

Those strategic and financial difficulties made things harder for Republican candidates already facing voters’ roiling anger over the lingering recession. In a year in which incumbents of both major parties had feared a backlash from increasingly disillusioned voters, most of that hostility was directed at Republicans, candidates and consultants agree.

“George Bush was considered the incumbent, and all Republicans were painted with the same brush,” Marston said. “Normally, if voters are angry with a president, you figure they’ll take it out on him and maybe his party’s candidates for Senate or Congress, but then they’ll come back. This time, they never came back.”

UC San Diego political scientist Steve Erie has dubbed the Nov. 3 results “the Revolt of the Hecklers--Home Equity Credit Line.”

“A lot of upper-middle-income people who thought they had maybe $300,000 in paper wealth in their homes found out they had only about $50,000, and decided to take it out on the incumbent party,” Erie said. “In San Diego, that made it a bad time to be a Republican.”

Even some Republican officeholders who survived Nov. 3 found that to be the case. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado), who consistently won reelection by landslide margins throughout the 1980s, turned back Democrat Janet Gastil by a 53%-41% total--a comfortable but hardly intimidating gap that could prompt Democratic leaders to make a stronger run at Hunter’s 52nd District seat in 1994.

The search for common themes in the election results, however, sometimes obscures individual factors on which many of the races turned.

Hunter, for example, created formidable political problems for himself through involvement in the House check-writing scandal and his participation in an Oval Office meeting that spawned Bush’s much-maligned attacks on Clinton’s patriotism.

And though unsuccessful Assembly candidates Baldwin and Dick Daleke paid a high political price over their ties to the Religious Right, that backlash does little to explain the losses by more moderate Republicans such as Marston and Jarvis in districts crafted to the GOP’s liking.

The simplest explanations for some races’ unexpected outcomes are often the most accurate, political consultant Jack Orr stressed. In a handful of major contests, he notes, the Democrats simply fielded stronger candidates who out-campaigned their GOP opponents, capitalizing on the political openings created by redistricting and Democratic registration drives.

“If the Republicans learned anything, it should be that they can’t just put up any candidate in any district and automatically expect to win, even in San Diego,” Orr said. “Poor candidates and incredible stupidity are no longer things you can count on overcoming.”

However, Orr and others argue that interpreting Democrats’ success at the polls as a sign of a potential major shift in San Diego politics is premature at best, particularly in light of county residents’ predictably conservative votes on local and state ballot propositions. By overwhelming margins, San Diegans voted for welfare reform, to repeal the state’s snack tax, against toll roads and against higher taxes on the wealthy.

“When you get away from some of the (candidate) races, it looked like the same old San Diego,” Orr said.

In addition, critical factors that shaped this year’s campaigns--none more important than independent presidential candidate Ross Perot’s strong 26% showing here, which drew many voters without strong ties to either major party into polling booths--may not become fixtures on the local political landscape.

Though many political observers say they will wait until 1994 to draw their conclusions on that issue, others warn that it would be ill-advised to dismiss this month’s results as simply a one-time electoral oddity.

“The factors that produced the ’92 election results are continuing,” said consultant Tom Shepard, who helped orchestrate Susan Golding’s narrow victory in the San Diego mayoral race and Dianne Jacob’s county supervisorial victory. “People are fundamentally disaffected from politics and are looking for fundamental change. I see no reason that those forces will be less powerful two years from now.”