Voter Group Favors Brown, Feinstein; Opposes Prop. 187

Steven Grimshaw voted for Pete Wilson in 1990 and until this week figured he’d vote Tuesday to give the battle-scarred governor another four years on the job.

But Grimshaw, 44, a West Hills Republican, now says he plans to vote for Wilson’s challenger, Democrat Kathleen Brown.

The reason: Grimshaw liked Brown’s 62-page booklet spelling out her vision for California. Wilson, says Grimshaw, has said too little about where he wants to lead the state.

“She’s got a plan for the future,” Grimshaw says of the state treasurer. “We’ve got to start there.”

As the long campaign for governor heads into its closing days, Brown’s task is to find and reach several hundred thousand Steven Grimshaws--independent-minded voters who are tired of political mudslinging and receptive to her pledge to restore the Golden State to its former luster.

Wilson’s campaign aides say Brown faces an almost impossible task. Independent polls and conventional wisdom tend to support that contention. But Brown and her advisers say the Democrat’s positive message is catching on--and they contend that a huge Election Day effort will bring out people who have not voted regularly and thus are not included in many polls.

Grimshaw was among 15 San Fernando Valley residents who met with a Times reporter and an editor three times in the final five weeks of the campaign. Undecided in the governor’s race when the sessions began in early October, these voters shared their views and discussed their reactions to the campaigns as they made up their minds.

The group was far too small to be a representative sample, and the participants’ behavior undoubtedly was affected by their involvement in the project. But the panel nonetheless provides a window into the thoughts of one group of voters.

The group included a mixture of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, ages 27 to 71. Most are working, two are unemployed, and all are probably more interested in politics--and informed about the issues--than the average voter.

In the final session Wednesday night, a majority said they had decided to vote for Brown over Wilson--a reversal of the first tally taken in early October. By a wide margin, they also said they would vote to reelect U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein over Rep. Mike Huffington (R-Santa Barbara). And they were decidedly against Proposition 187, the controversial immigration control initiative.

Although almost every member of the group believes that illegal immigration is a major problem, the tally was 10 to 4 against the ballot measure, which would expel undocumented children from the public schools and deny other services, except emergency health care, to people not residing here legally.

Felipe Hervias, a 27-year-old computer programmer from Reseda, says police officers whom he encounters in Los Angeles already act as if he is a gang member. The Caltech employee said the initiative would make him even more suspect, simply because of the color of his skin.

“It’s going to cause a lot of harm--harm to me,” Hervias said.

The margin against Proposition 187 among the participants might have been even greater except for an angry backlash against the tactics of the initiative’s opponents. Protests involving high school students and rallies in which demonstrators carried the Mexican flag have angered several of these mainstream voters and soured them on the opposition’s campaign.

“I know it’s no good, but I’m offended by the people who are against it,” said Marvin Hershman, a contracts manager at Litton Industries. “I’m offended by the way the students are carrying on in school. So I might just vote for it on principle.”

Although they felt strongly about illegal immigration, many members of the group did not place much importance on how the candidates for governor and the Senate stood on Proposition 187.

In the Senate race, 10 of the panelists said they would vote for Feinstein and five said they either would not vote in the race or would choose a third-party candidate. None were for Huffington.

But none of Feinstein’s backers said they were angered by Huffington’s support for the immigration initiative, and only a few said they were influenced by the revelation that the congressman had employed an illegal immigrant to care for his children.

Instead, most cited Feinstein’s record, Huffington’s lack of one, or the Republican’s attempt to “buy the election” with his huge personal fortune.

In the governor’s race, where the tally was 10 to 5 for Brown, three of Wilson’s supporters said they would vote against Proposition 187, which the governor vigorously supports. And three of Brown’s backers said they would vote for the initiative even though Brown has condemned it.

The same sort of crossover occurred on other issues. Most of Brown’s supporters--unlike the candidate--favor the death penalty, and many worry that she will be more eager than Wilson to raise taxes. But they do not dwell on those details.

Instead, most of those who said they would vote for Brown cited her written plan, in which she lays out a point-by-point agenda for education, economic growth, fighting crime and battling illegal immigration. They were more impressed by the idea of the plan than its specifics; few could recall individual proposals that they liked.

“I don’t want to reelect the governor,” said Joseph Jurick, a West Hills Democrat who works as an aerospace engineer for Hughes Aircraft. “I will vote for Brown mainly because she’s got a vision of what she wants to do. With Wilson, it’s like he’s on a raft going down the stream--no rudder.”

Two weeks ago, Marsha Frame, an accountant, said she had no interest in reading Brown’s detailed plan. The candidate, Frame said, should be able to spell out her agenda in a few simple sentences. But the Reseda Democrat changed her tune after the Brown campaign mailed her a copy of the document.

“I started reading and went for about an hour and a half,” Frame said. “I have to eat my words. It did sway me toward Kathleen Brown because she did put something down.”

But others said Brown’s many promises sound too good to be true.

“These things she is talking about are utopian,” said Takuro Nakae, a retired engineer and a Republican. “At least with Wilson we know what he can do and what he can’t do.”

Steven Glazer, a senior adviser to Brown, said the campaign has printed more than 1.5 million copies of the plan and has mailed out most of them and distributed 500,000 at public events. He said The Times’ focus group reflects the tendency of many voters to leave their political deliberations till the last minute.

He said the campaign believes that many of those voters have kept a copy of Brown’s plan handy and will consult it when they make their final decision.

“The electorate,” Glazer said, “is unhappy with the direction of the state and yearns for serious and substantive answers.”

But Dan Schnur, a spokesman for Wilson, said that almost all the voters already have made up their minds, and most of those are going to vote for the governor. He said the remaining undecideds, such as the members of The Times’ panel, are heavily weighted toward Democrats and could be expected to tilt toward Brown, but there are too few of them to carry her to victory.

Schnur said Wilson invites voters to judge him on his record; he doesn’t need a slickly printed brochure to get his points across. But with Wilson’s job approval rating still low compared to that of other California governors who have sought reelection, his campaign has worked hard to portray Brown as a risky choice who is out of step with the voters.

After viewing a barrage of Wilson television ads blasting Brown for her stands on crime, immigration and taxes, many voters who are not fond of the governor have concluded that he is the lesser of two evils.

“I don’t like it, but I would vote for this Republican,” said Hershman, the Litton contracts manager. “We’ve had worse in the past.”

How Voters’ Views Were Gauged

To learn what voters are thinking, The Times, assisted by Davis Research of Calabasas, selected a group of San Fernando Valley residents who have voted in at least two of the last three elections and were undecided about the race for governor.

The group included a cross-section of voters but was far too small to be a representative sampling of the electorate.

The Times talked to the same voters three times to learn what has made them decide how to vote. The final discussion took place Wednesday over dinner provided by The Times at its Chatsworth office.