Rematch Is Also a Referendum

Robin Prodanovich wriggles her toes into the sand of a Santa Barbara beach, leisurely pondering her local congressional race--an election that may provide the best snapshot in California of how the GOP’s famed freshman class will fare this fall.

Forty miles north, Jerry Williams Jr. discusses the same contest with his boots planted in an acrid muck of cow, horse, goat and sheep manure.

Like many voters canvassed in this central coast district, both Prodanovich and Williams list the economy and environment as top concerns. But their views on those matters are as sharply dissimilar as the area’s landscapes and lifestyles.

In 1994, the 22nd House District race between Republican Andrea Seastrand and Democrat Walter Holden Capps “presented as nice a contrast of cultural views as any in the country,” according to the Almanac of American Politics.

This year, the pair’s rematch offers an antsy electorate a chance to issue a report card not only on Seastrand, but on the so-called “Republican Revolution” that carried her and more than 70 other GOP freshmen into office, giving their party control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

Although Republicans have had a lock on the 22nd District seat for decades, of late the area’s voters have seemed as unsettled as the nationwide electorate. In the 1988 presidential race, the district backed George Bush; in 1992, Clinton. Now, with registration for the two major parties a dead heat--42% for each--the 22nd is exactly the sort of swing district Democrats need to win if they hope to regain the House.

Seastrand barely won two years ago--she captured her seat by a margin of just 1,563 votes out of more than 208,000 cast.

Capps, who is preparing to get back on the campaign trail after an automobile accident in May, calls this year’s race a rerun of 1994, with one difference: Voters have now seen the congressional GOP’s Contract with America in action and, according to several nationwide polls, have reservations about its specifics.

Certainly, the contest presents a clear choice. On most issues, Capps, a UC Santa Barbara religious studies professor, is Seastrand’s opposite. She opposes abortion rights; he supports them. She is against expanding rights for homosexuals; he supports gay rights. She is generally in ideological sync with religious conservatives; he wrote a book hinting at danger in Christian conservatism’s push into politics.

In Washington, the congresswoman has been a stalwart of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). But back home, Seastrand contends, voters are judging her as an individual, rather than lumping her with the speaker--who is taking a beating in the polls. “Newt is not a factor here. I never hear his name mentioned.”

Back on the beach, however, mention Gingrich to Prodanovich and she jabs finger to tongue, the universal sign for “gag me.”

The GOP record on environmental issues is one reason for her reaction--she thinks the Republicans are so intent on deregulation that they will let the ozone layer evaporate and beaches cake with spilled oil. But her real concern, she says, is financial. A recent widow with two college-bound teenage sons, Prodanovich says that the Democrats would fix the economy right up, “if the Republicans would just let them.”

Williams, a rancher and livestock broker, has an entirely different view of the economy, the environment and Gingrich.

“I think he’s doing a lot of good things,” Williams, 32, says as a tangle of weaned calves clamber into an 18-wheeler at his family’s livestock market in the Santa Ynez Valley town of Buellton. “Anyone who is having an impact, getting something done, is gonna get rocks thrown at him,” he says.

Williams’ family runs cattle on up to 20,000 acres, but a drought in Texas, he says, has forced so much livestock onto the market that the industry is reeling.

“A lot of people going out of business,” he says. About the only way things could get worse, he adds, is if voters put the economy in the hands of the Democrats, who show their disdain for business by saddling ranchers with excessive regulation and embracing the sort of “environmental extremists” who will shut a rancher down “if they find a certain frog in your creek.”

And so the views go in the 22nd District, where politics shift to the right as one heads north through Santa Barbara County and into San Luis Obispo County.

The Santa Barbara area, influenced by its UC campus and big-city expatriates, is a Democratic stronghold. Republicans rule the smaller towns and rural rolling oak land to the north.

On a Buellton road lined by fields strewn with hay bales, for instance, conversation tends to toe the macho cowboy line. “I’m sick of paying taxes so people can sit home and not do anything,” says Larry Gearhart, a 54-year-old ranch manager. “I work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and nobody’s giving me a handout.”

The GOP Congress, with its bid to shrink government, is “absolutely on the right track,” he says.

Rap on a door near downtown Santa Barbara and you’ll probably hear views that have been sifted through the town’s arts and academic filters.

“A lot of Americans think the Contract with America turned out to be a thinly veiled rehash of trickle-down economics and slashing of social programs,” says Donald Devitch, 40, a business manager for UC Santa Barbara’s arts and lectures program.

“The Republican agenda of diminishing services of the sick and elderly is preposterous,” he says. “It goes against the spirit of America, which is to help people out.”

While committed partisans dig in their heels on either side of the ideological tug-of-war, many voters are still sorting out the issues and adjusting their views.

In Buellton, for example, it’s easy to find people who want to balance the budget and downsize Washington, easy to find people who would put a priority on spending for education, and possible to find people who would do both.

“I’m very interested in reducing spending on everything--except education,” says jRepublican David Flynt, who commutes to a programming job at UC Santa Barbara while his wife teaches school in Lompoc.

Dozens of voters expressed similar pick-and-choose, party-bending attitudes on crime, welfare and Proposition 187, the state’s anti-illegal immigration measure.

Pete Grossi, 63, a native of the Santa Ynez Valley, lets loose a string of expletives at mention of the judge who struck down parts of Proposition 187 as unconstitutional. “Who died and made him God?” the owner of Grossi’s Muffler Shop in Buellton asks.

But Grossi is also a diehard Democrat who thinks President Clinton’s defeated health care plan would have been “the best thing that happened to America.” So he won’t support Seastrand, despite her support of immigration reform.

Voters’ views are even trickier to read on environmental issues, perhaps because every part of the district has some sort of local environmental issue being hashed out, from drought-related water problems in Santa Barbara proper to Santa Maria strawberry growers’ use of the fungicide methyl bromide.

On some major environmental issues, Seastrand sometimes seems as if she is tiptoeing through one of the area’s cow pastures. She voted to cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, but broke with Gingrich and supported a measure to extend a moratorium on future oil drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel.

“The environment is an issue that is going to split the Republican Party,” says Eric Smith, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who studies district voting patterns. “Some activist Republicans are certainly delighted that Seastrand voted to cut funding for the EPA,” he says. “But she will lose moderate and liberal Republicans.”

Santa Barbara residents George and Allyn Ann Gaynes, 79 and 69 respectively, express dismay at what they see as the local Republican attitude toward the environment.

“They keep thinking Santa Barbara is like Dayton, Ohio, or something: ‘Industry! Development!’, “ says George, who, like his wife, is a film and television actor.

“Santa Barbara,” Allyn Ann says, “is a tourist town, a university town.” And old economic models just don’t fit their home of seven years, the devout Democrats and Capps supporters say.

But the Gaynes’ brand of slow-growth environmentalism, entrenched in some Santa Barbara circles at least since the days of the 1969 oil spill, gives many longtime Buellton residents conniptions.

Santa Barbara’s “tree-huggers” are driving industry out of the area, says a sun-battered hay hauler who asked not to be named. “Do they think the retired people are going to keep the economy going?” he asks.

But general contractor Timm Donathan takes what seems the more common view.

“We have to have oil development here if we’re going to get by,” he says. “There has to be a balance between developing natural resources and protecting the environment.”

But that doesn’t mean he would sacrifice everything for the sake of better business--not even his own.

“Most people who live here came from Los Angeles, and we saw what happened,” he says, stepping onto the porch of his Buellton home in a quiet neighborhood where children roam from lawn to lawn and every passing car offers a wave.

Donathan’s views on the environment aren’t the only reason why the registered Democrat’s vote is still up for grabs. Draw him out, and he sounds as if he’s split on the whole GOP agenda: Reducing government is a great idea, but he supports abortion rights. And prayer in the schools just makes him nervous.

For their parts, Capps and Seastrand take predictably divergent views on how the issues are playing with voters.

“There’s not a lot of respect for what the Republican Congress did in the last two years,” Capps says. “I pick that up everywhere.”

But Seastrand says that she has walked in plenty of district parades lately, and at each one spectators stood on the sidelines shouting: “Stay the course.”