Voters Go to Polls to Replace Pat Nolan : Politics: Special election is first in a series to determine successor for 43rd District Assembly seat.

Republican voters from Glendale, Burbank, Los Feliz and Silver Lake will try to identify an heir to former state Assemblyman Pat Nolan in a special election today while local Democrats groom a champion they hope will wrest Nolan’s old district away from the GOP.

The special election, featuring four Republican candidates, two Democratic candidates and a Libertarian--was triggered by Nolan’s forced resignation last February after pleading guilty to one count of political racketeering.

If any candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, he or she will serve the last seven months of Nolan’s term, which expires Dec. 5. But such an outcome is seen as unlikely.

“With this many candidates chasing the job, it’s going to be very difficult to win outright,” said Sheila McNichols, campaign manager for one of the two top-ranked GOP candidates.

Barring the unexpected, the top vote-getter from each party will square off on June 28 in a special election runoff for the 43rd Assembly District. The winner will serve as Assembly member until December.

But the election derby for the 43rd District doesn’t end there. Still up for grabs will be the new two-year Assembly term that begins Dec. 5. Regular elections to fill that seat will be held June 7 (the primary) and Nov. 8 (the general).

All seven candidates in today’s election will also be running in the June 7 primary. In addition, two more Republicans and one more Democrat will be in the primary.

The Glendale-Burbank area has been a GOP bastion for decades, but there are signs of change.

Nolan’s guilty plea and resignation left Republicans in disarray and has threatened to produce a bloody and protracted GOP succession battle.

The Nolan collapse also followed implementation of a reapportionment plan that eroded GOP strength by adding Silver Lake and Los Feliz to the 43rd District. Before the remapping, the district was 47% Republican, 42% Democrat; now, it’s 44% Democratic and 42% Republican.

In 1992, red flags went up in GOP quarters when Bill Clinton, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer carried the district, albeit by narrow margins.

Now, Democratic strategists are hoping to turn the tables again with former Assistant U. S. Atty. Adam Schiff, who left his job in December to begin campaigning. Schiff, 33, is facing only minor opposition for the job of Democratic standard-bearer in the 43rd District.

Schiff’s campaign consultant is veteran Parke Skelton, who insists that the 43rd District is no longer like Orange County and can be won by a moderate Democrat like Schiff, who has tough-on-crime credentials.

Meanwhile, the two top GOP candidates in today’s election, Glendale Municipal Judge James Rogan and Julia Wu, an elected member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, have engaged in mudslinging.

Rogan, 36, a Glendale resident, emphasized his Horatio Alger past as he vied for the support of Nolan partisans and received sizable financial help from the Allied Business PAC, a Christian conservative group composed of four wealthy businessmen, investors and their wives.

A recent Rogan mailer says the candidate grew up in a broken family and never completed high school but, nevertheless, went on to be recognized as one of the state’s top prosecutors. He was appointed by to the bench by then-Gov. George Deukmejian.

Wu, who emigrated to the United States from Taiwan as a young woman, has been pitching herself as a longtime Republican Party activist who got her start in politics working for former President Richard Nixon’s campaigns and proved her electability by beating an incumbent in 1987 for a seat on the community college board.

Wu has challenged Rogan’s party origins, noting that he had been a Democrat--indeed, a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party Central Committee--until 1988, when he converted to Republicanism. Wu has called Rogan an “opportunist” who switched parties to be appointed by a GOP governor to a judgeship, and she has tried, in a last-minute mailer, to implicate Rogan in several plea-bargain deals both as a prosecutor and a judge.

Rogan has attacked Wu’s charges as sleazy and fired off an attack mailer of his own, claiming that Wu, as a college trustee, had voted to double her salary and supported a widely criticized plan to establish a slush fund.

The squabbling within GOP ranks is not likely to abate soon. Once today’s election is finished, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Peter Repovich, 36, will enter the Republican fray in earnest. Repovich is a candidate in the June 7 Republican primary, not in the special election, and has a war chest of more than $300,000, much of it in the form of a loan from a well-to-do friend.

Repovich has called himself the outsider who can best restore rank-and-file Republicans’ faith in their party after the Nolan debacle. Rogan’s candidacy in particular is simply the product of Glendale’s old boy’s network, Repovich has claimed.

Thus, the Republican who gets into the special election runoff will likely be “fighting two battles at once--one against the other Republicans in the June 7 primary and the other against the Democrat in the runoff,” noted Jot Condie, Wu’s campaign manager.

In addition to Rogan and Wu, the GOP candidates are David Wallis, an engineer and activist, and Joseph Pietroforte, retired public accountant. Besides Schiff, Ken Kulpa, a broadcaster, is running as a Democrat. The Libertarian candidate is Willard Michlin, a real estate broker.

Political observers expect a light turnout for today’s election.