Pivotal State Contest Has a Familiar Ring

If the Robert K. Dornan-Loretta Sanchez congressional race is the county’s featured political fight, Jim Morrissey against Lou Correa for the 69th Assembly District ranks high on the undercard.

Morrissey (R-Santa Ana), a freshman Assemblyman and former machine shop owner, is considered the solid favorite because of his incumbent status, but an upset win by Correa would be a dramatic coup for the Democrats. The other candidate, Larry G. Engwall of the Natural Law Party, is a longshot at best.

“If the Democrats knocked Morrissey off, it would cause serious problems,” said Dick Rosengarten, editor of the weekly political newsletter Calpeek, noting that the GOP’s tenuous hold on the Assembly speakership is at stake.

Both the congressional race and assembly race share some similarities.

They feature underdog Latino Democrats Correa and Sanchez against established white Republican incumbents, Morrissey and Dornan (R-Garden Grove). Like Sanchez, Correa is a relatively unknown, longtime Anaheim resident who never has held public office.

And the two districts cover much of the same, largely blue-collar, central Orange County territory: the 69th Assembly District includes most of Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Anaheim, a swath of land that is also a major part of Dornan’s 46th Congressional District.

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The 69th district is quintessential 1990s Orange County, where a shrinking white majority is becoming overshadowed by an ethnic mix of immigrants--primarily Latinos, Vietnamese and Koreans--who tend to register Democratic but often fail to vote.

This is also the only assembly district in the county where Democrats enjoy an advantage over Republicans in registered voters--46,555 to 29,393, nearly a 20% edge. But Democrats have found it difficult to translate that advantage into victories.

“The district is made up of a significant amount of minorities; something like 76% of the district are minorities. But the people who vote on election day are overwhelmingly Anglo,” said George Urch, who was chief of staff for former Assemblyman Tom Umberg, the Democrat who beat Curt Pringle to win the 69th in 1990 and is now running the Clinton campaign in California.

“Historically, the Democratic base doesn’t turn out to vote, but the Republicans do,” Urch said. In the March primary, the Democratic voter turnout was 19% compared to the Republicans’ 38%.

As Urch points out, being a Latino has not proven to be a political advantage in this district. Garden Grove has never had a Latino council member in its 40-year history and Anaheim has had only one--Lou Lopez.

The largest portion of the district lies in Santa Ana--with the second highest concentration of Latinos in any city in the country--after El Paso, Texas. But only three of its seven-member City Council are Latinos.

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The Santa Ana Unified School District has only one Latino on its five-member board of trustees--Sal Mendoza--and he’s a registered Republican.

Correa, 38, downplays the importance of the Latino issue.

“I’m not running a campaign reaching out only to Latinos,” said Correa, who is married to a physician and the father of three children. “My problem is getting Democrats out to vote.”

Correa is carrying the message that he is the candidate for the American working class. He wants working people to be represented on such issues as proper overtime pay and increases in the minimum wage as well as solid support for the public school system, he said.

“I just hope the American worker, both Democrat and Republican, understands the difference between the two parties,” Correa said. “I think it’s very clear, especially in workers’ issues.”

The workers of today need to be trained in the techniques and skills that will allow them “to survive in the 21st century,” Correa said.

Morrissey, 66, who defeated Mike Metzler, a former Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce president in 1992, also suggests he is a workers’ candidate. The creation of jobs will continue to be the focus of his time in office, Morrissey said.

Progress has been made but the district continues to suffer from lack of good jobs, he said.

“My big thing for the past two years has been to try and create jobs,” said Morrissey, who has been married to his wife, Margaret, for 44 years and has six children and 12 grandchildren. “Unemployment is at 7.7% in Santa Ana, which is most of my district, while it’s 4% in the rest of Orange County. If we could put just half of these people to work, we would have a tremendous amount of money coming into the economy.”

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Morrissey, a former Democrat, also supports standard Republican fare that includes tort reform, cutting back on government regulations over business and “sensible environmental laws that don’t kill jobs.”

Engwall, 42, a Santa Ana structural engineer and former Republican who is not married, said he turned to the Natural Law Party because “Republicans and Democrats don’t solve our problems.” His party, the county’s newest, believes in such ideals as fiscal conservatism, flatter taxes, a balanced budget and even meditation to solve the state’s problems.

“I hope people eventually wake up and quit trying the old, failed methods,” Engwall said. “Our attitude is to use methods that are scientifically proven to work.”

Most observers agree it would be a major upset if anyone other than Morrissey were to win. But questions remain.

Will Democratic Party’s Latino caucus, which has been relatively silent in this race so far, come to the aid of Correa in the final days of the campaign? Will the momentum generated on a national level by Sanchez and the publicity garnered by Correa when he shared the podium in Santa Ana last week with President Clinton turn out the lethargic Democratic vote?

With home-grown Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) hanging on to his powerful post by a single Assembly vote, this race has the GOP concerned, Rosengarten said.

“Clearly, the Republicans are worried,” he said.