New Party Line : County’s GOP Leadership Is Focused on Drawing Broad Support

Two years ago, Ventura County’s Republican Party Central Committee was bankrupt and caught up in a bitter power struggle between moderates and a conservative Christian majority bent on promoting its anti-abortion agenda.

It was enough to get old-guard Republicans like Paul Leavens riled up. Leavens, a Ventura rancher, had not served on the committee in 20 years.

“I didn’t like the direction the Central Committee was going in--to the very far right--and losing middle-of-the-road Republicans, particularly women,” he said. “I got angry and threw my hat in the ring.”

Leavens joined a slate of candidates fielded by the newly formed Committee to Elect Responsible Republicans, which succeeded in ousting the Central Committee’s conservative Christian faction in 1992.

“We’ve now got what we call a big-tent committee, which welcomes all Republicans,” he said.

Since the change in leadership, the 22-member committee has directed its focus back on basic party-building functions, such as registering voters, raising money and arranging get-out-the-vote efforts on Election Day. The committee also endorses candidates--usually in the GOP primary--and oversees the activities of the various Republican clubs in the county.

“We’re very strong now, very united,” said Bob Larkin, a Simi Valley insurance agent who was elected committee chairman last year. “We’ve really tried to pull together.”

One of the most significant changes under Larkin’s leadership has been the committee’s fund-raising success, which he attributed largely to Leavens, the finance chairman.

“We started out with a minus $84 bank account a year ago,” Larkin said. “Once all the controversy started and got in the papers, the money dried up. People don’t like to send money into a controversy.”

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In 1993, however, the committee collected more than $15,000 in contributions and has about the same amount in its treasury this year to boost the campaigns of Republican candidates in county, state and national races. Once people learned about the new committee leadership, Larkin said, raising money got a lot easier.

“People identified the new committee members as good-quality Republicans who were going to use that money to register voters,” said Larkin, noting that the committee recently hired a full-time fund-raiser. “So the money came in fast.”

Brian Fox, a Ventura attorney appointed to the committee last year, said the group’s ability to raise money again “is one of the most telling examples of how the present incumbent group has turned the committee around.”

“We had to go through a real rebuilding effort because of the events of the last two years,” he said. “But we’re doing very well this year.”

In addition to fund raising, the committee is concentrating on recruiting more minorities, particularly Latinos and blacks, to the Republican Party. Last year, the committee published its brochure in both English and Spanish.

“We are the party that freed the slaves, and we were the party for equality and all those things,” said Larkin, whose committee includes one African American. “We should really attract Hispanics and blacks. They belong in our party and we need to get them.”

But there are other incentives to register minorities. In 1990, Rep. Elton Gallegly’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn to include all of Ventura County except Thousand Oaks. Among the cities Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) picked up were Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Paula, all with large Latino populations.

Gallegly, who has offended some Latinos with his hard-line stance on illegal immigration, handily beat Democratic opponent Anita Perez Ferguson in 1992 to retain his congressional seat. But Ferguson and the Democrats were successful in registering thousands of Latino voters, Larkin said.

“The Democrats ran a very aggressive registration campaign in 1992,” Larkin said. “They gained about 12,000 or 13,000 voters on us. We plan to take that back this year. We’re hoping to register about 15,000 voters.”

Republicans now have 149,361 voters registered in the county, about 8,000 more than the Democrats.

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To help maintain and increase the lead, Larkin said, the committee is putting together a computerized voter-information file, which will make it easier to target Republican voters and organize the committee’s precinct operations.

“Hopefully, this will make us a stronger organization and we can avoid duplicating the efforts” of candidates, Larkin said.

As for the Central Committee’s elections in June, Larkin doesn’t expect conservative Christians to mount an attempt to recoup control.

“I don’t know if any of the seats on the committee will be contested this time,” he said. “I hope not.”

Although some members who were philosophically aligned with the previous leadership remain, Larkin said there have been no infighting problems.

“We have in our group six or seven pretty strong pro-life people,” he said. “But in their case, that’s a personal belief and they don’t try to bring that into the Central Committee. It doesn’t belong there.”

Richard Ferrier, a former committee chairman who supported the conservative Christian faction and was among those ousted in the last election, agreed that the panel was too divisive in the past.

“Both sides were factional and eager to fight when we should have spent our time and energy winning elections,” he said.

Ferrier, a tutor at St. Aquinas College in Santa Paula, said he would like to serve on the committee again.

“I was not disillusioned by the experience,” he said. “I know in any organization you’re going to have disagreements. I actually found it to be a rather ennobling experience. It’s something I’d like to do again.”