Holiday Cheer Lost in December Election : Politics: Candidates for state Senate seat invoke Christmas themes during oddly timed contest, but goodwill is hard to find.

Make a new entry on the list of California political stratagems: Santa spin.

Both combatants are invoking the bipartisan charisma of Old St. Nick in a high-spending and oddly timed special election set for Tuesday to fill a state Senate seat from southern San Diego County.

Steve Peace, a Democratic assemblyman seeking to move up after 11 years, has Santa’s cap hanging from the A in his last name on his red-and-white campaign signs.

Joseph Ghougassian, a Republican business owner and former diplomat trying to paint Peace as a tax-and-spend profligate, goes further: One of his mailers has Santa Claus checking his list with the caption “Maybe if Steve Peace’s Big Tax list was shorter, your holiday gift list could be longer.”

With a 49%-35% registration advantage for Democrats, conventional wisdom would signal an easy victory for Peace in this blue-collar, ethnically diverse district on the Mexican border.

But this is an unconventional election at the end of an unconventional year. Republicans have won four of five special races for state Senate seats. One consistent factor in the races has been low turnout among Democratic voters.

“We’re finding that Democrats are not voting in February, August, September or November,” said Los Angeles-based Republican consultant Ron Smith, who is not involved in the San Diego race. “Will they vote in December? We’ll find out.”

Republicans are hoping that having the election on Dec. 28, just as voters are struggling back to work after Christmas and beginning to think of New Year’s revelry, will decrease Democratic turnout and be Peace’s undoing.

If so, it would be a political irony of the first order.

The odd timing of the special election was forced by the abrupt decision of Peace’s mentor, Wadie Deddeh (D-Bonita), to retire and return to a job teaching political science at Southwest Community College rather than serve the final year of his third term.

Deddeh’s return to the job he left 27 years earlier to enter politics was supported by G. Gordon Browning, who is Peace’s stepfather and president of the board of trustees at Southwestern.

Ghougassian has charged that the special election is an example of “politics as usual,” designed to let Peace win the seat before redistricting slices the Democratic advantage nearly in half in 1994. Peace responds that Deddeh’s decision was his own and not part of some back-room deal.

The stakes on Dec. 28 go beyond the boundaries of the 40th District, which currently start at the Mexican border, encompass several suburban communities and stretch to the edge of downtown San Diego.

A Ghougassian victory would cut the Democratic margin in the Senate to four (21 to 17) and lend some weight to the GOP claim that it will win enough seats in 1994, or 1996 at the latest, to take control of the upper house.

When Peace failed to win outright in the six-candidate primary in November, the Republicans smelled a chance for an upset in the runoff. With candidates of both parties listed on the same ballot, Peace received 48% and Ghougassian 25% of the vote, placing first and second.

Combined campaign spending for the two may exceed $2 million, the result of heavy spending by the Republican and Democratic parties, aggressive fund raising by both candidates, and Ghougassian’s loaning his campaign more than $200,000.

Turnout on election day may barely reach 15%, both camps estimate. Such a low turnout will earn the campaigns the dubious distinction of being the most expensive on a per-vote basis for any legislative office in county history.

The good vibrations of the holiday season have not changed the harsh timbre of political rhetoric.

Peace, 40, probably best known outside his district as the youthful producer of the cult film “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” attacks Ghougassian as a tool of the far right and the Christian fundamentalists. “A real nut case,” he said.

Ghougassian, 49, responds that Peace is a career politician who has been soft on illegal immigration and high on taxes. “He’s gone mad, he’s disconnected, he’s all over the place,” he said.

In each case, the caricatures are a bit overdone.

Peace worked with Gov. Pete Wilson to ensure passage of workers’ compensation reform, authored a successful bill cracking down on shady credit-rating services, and is supported by an array of business and professional groups.

Ghougassian, a former philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is receiving support from the Christian right but has also been heartily endorsed by the party’s moderate leaders, such as Ken Maddy and Tom Campbell. He directed the Peace Corps in Yemen and now runs a trade and export consulting firm.

Figuring on voter lethargy on election day, both candidates have pushed hard to persuade voters to vote by mail with absentee ballots.