Minor Parties Can Have Major Clout : Election: Exit polls in the June party primaries show a possible 20% defection from Brown, Wilson in November.

Howard Stern isn’t running for governor of New York after all. The shock jock’s withdrawal as the Libertarian Party nominee puts an end to news coverage of minor party candidates for the 1994 election season.

That’s too bad, because minor parties could determine one of the biggest elections of the year, the high-stakes California governor’s race. If June primary exit polls are to be believed, alternative parties could take as much as 20% of the vote from Kathleen Brown and Pete Wilson.

In a Times’ exit poll of Democratic primary voters, more than 10%--25% of John Garamendi supporters and 18% of Tom Hayden supporters--said they would vote for “someone else” in a Brown-Wilson race. Among Republicans, 28% of Ron Unz supporters, slightly less than 10% of the voters in that primary, said they’d vote for “someone else.”

Those opinions could change by November, of course, but primary voters are among the most committed party loyalists, especially given June’s record low turnout, and presumably the least likely to abandon their party’s standard bearer. A 20% tally for minor parties may be unlikely, but a substantial protest vote seems almost inevitable.

Wilson, in particular, could be in trouble. Unz’s non-endorsement--he urged supporters to vote for candidates who shared their “principles of lower taxes and less government”--sounded like a plug for the Libertarians. And Libertarian candidate Richard Rider is now campaigning for Unz voters, focusing on Wilson’s record on taxes.

Meanwhile, the state’s largest minor party, the all-but-invisible American Independent Party, is growing rapidly. Since 1992, it has picked up more than 54,000 registered members--9% of total growth in voter registration and about three times the increase in Republicans. The party can capture Perotistas with its name alone, and for anti-Wilson conservatives, its George Wallace roots promise a platform that out-toughs the governor on immigration and crime.

Brown can’t count on minor parties to beat Wilson for her, however. Her exit poll losses were even higher than his, and both the Greens and the Peace and Freedom Party offer alternatives to her on the left. Since many protest votes are decided at the last minute, an attractive ballot label can be enough to woo the disaffected.

Reporters, then, shouldn’t let their two-party habits blind them. Minor party votes have risen sharply in the last few years. Among congressional races with an alternative-party option, the minor party vote has gone from less than 1% in 1986 to 6.5% in 1990 to 9.4% in 1992, according to data collected by Ryan Iwasaka for a Claremont McKenna College thesis.

In California, minor party or independent candidates took more than the spread between the Democrat and the Republican in nine 1992 House races, two state Senate races and four Assembly races. For the U.S. Senate seat won by Democrat Barbara Boxer, candidates from the American Independent, Peace and Freedom and Libertarian parties got almost 10% of the vote. Boxer beat Republican Bruce Herschensohn by five points.

That same year, Georgia Republican Paul Coverdell won election to the U.S. Senate only after a 3% showing by Libertarian Jim Hudson threw the race into a runoff. Coverdell courted Libertarian voters and beat Democratic incumbent Wyche Fowler by 15,000 votes.

In Democratic Hawaii, the Green Party’s Linda Martin won 14% of the vote against incumbent Sen. Daniel Inouye, who was tarred by sexual-harassment charges. And in Ohio, similarly scandal-tarnished Democrat John Glenn, one of the “Keating Five,” won reelection to the Senate with barely 51% of the vote; news reports neglected to mention that 7% went to Martha Grevatt, an independent.

Minor parties provide two kinds of protest votes: anti-scandal, as in Ohio and Hawaii, and ideological, as in Georgia. In either case, alternative parties let voters express their dissatisfaction with government as usual. Though neither Pete Wilson nor Kathleen Brown is tarred by scandal, both definitely represent the political Establishment. And both are running name-calling centrist campaigns with positions based more on polls than on principles.

November’s, then, could prove the biggest election yet for minor parties in California, a state whose culture encourages diversity and self-expression. The ballot will have at least four alternative candidates for governor. And though none will be a famous shock jock, how they do is a story worth following.