Dornan Had Himself on Run

Win or lose, the photo finish in Rep. Robert K. Dornan’s reelection campaign should have taught him one important lesson, GOP insiders said Thursday: Wasting financial and political capital on a White House race could have cost him the most competitive seat in Orange County.

With Dornan holding a narrow 233-vote lead over Democratic challenger Loretta Sanchez, in a race that will not be decided until thousands of late absentee ballots are counted next week, Republicans blamed the tightness of the race on Dornan’s presidential bid, which caused him to get a late start on his local reelection campaign.

As Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour said about the Dornan race in an interview with The Times: “It is not unusual for a person to run for president unsuccessfully and for it to hurt them back home.”

But Dornan, the Garden Grove Republican, has no regrets.

Running for president was “one of the greatest things I ever did in my life,” Dornan said Thursday, confident that he has won the central Orange County district race.

Republicans also said Dornan did not anticipate early enough the strength of the Democratic challenge, nor did he return to his district to campaign for the seat until about two months before the election. Even when he announced his reelection bid for Congress, he did so while campaigning in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

And he had to scramble for funds as the clock ran out after running up a $44,000 debt in loans he personally made to his failed presidential campaign.

“The lesson is that all of us are well-advised to store acorns against the winter,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), a strong Dornan ally. “It’s always ill-advised to take any opposition for granted and not to have raised the necessary funds well in advance.”

Orange County businessman George Argyros, one of the county’s top financial contributors, added: “I think the Democrats put up a good race and Bob spent a lot of time running for president. . . . He did what he thought was best. It’s much closer than he should have been, but he is ahead. But he doesn’t have an airtight Republican district.”

Newport Beach attorney and campaign contributor Dana Reed said publicly what others mentioned privately: “This should be Bob’s last term. In order for the Republicans to keep that seat, we should look to [outgoing Assembly Speaker] Curt Pringle to run in two years. . . . No Republican wants to lose that seat.”

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The blue-collar district has been highly contested in recent years because Democrats hold a voter registration edge over Republicans.

In the past, Dornan has determinedly beat back highly touted challenges by Democrats, and even by a moderate Republican woman in 1992. This year, however, Dornan needed help from the National Republican Campaign Committee, which paid for $60,000 in direct mailing. National GOP committees also contributed more than $7,200. Some GOP colleagues, including House Majority Leader Richard Armey of Texas, also gave $12,000.

“I am allowed to have some fun and I am allowed to run for president, and if that means I have to turn to the Republican Party for the first time in 20 years, that should be OK,” Dornan said.

The feisty congressman said he “offered to give the district back to [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich, if he thought he could find anyone else who could beat a woman and a Latina in a 50% Hispanic district. I am the only Republican who could do it.”

He said the erosion in his vote totals is due to the defeats of then-President George Bush in 1992, and this year’s GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, who he said were unwilling to aggressively deliver the conservative viewpoint, which is the trademark of Dornan’s legislative record. Bush and Dole “knew the lyrics of the conservative song on social issues, but they did not know the music,” he said.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) also said Dornan was hurt by two factors that were not of his own doing: Democrats pumped about $3 million into California congressional districts, including the Dornan-Sanchez race, and Dole’s campaign mistakenly released a concession statement about two hours before the California polls closed, hurting voter turnout.

“Had that not happened, we would not have had a close race here,” Royce maintained.

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But Wylie A. Aitken, Sanchez’s key financial backer, said that each time a Democrat has run against Dornan in recent years, the party has solidified its base.

If Dornan survives, a point Aitken is not yet willing to concede, “I think the lesson is quite clear that it’s time for him to move on. Everyone knows how vulnerable he is and the sharks are swimming around.”

The Democratic National Committee chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, agreed that Democrats are making inroads.

“Who would have imagined a few years ago that a candidate by the name of Sanchez would be within a few hundred votes of a Republican candidate in Orange County?” Dodd remarked during a meeting Thursday at The Times’ Washington bureau that included Barbour.

A local Republican strategist privately expressed frustration that Dornan does not get involved in local voter registration or absentee ballot drives. “He is never there. You should see how much Ed Royce and Chris Cox are in their districts,” the strategist said.

One of the congressman’s strongest allies, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, said it took Dornan until September to make time for a breakfast meeting Sheldon had arranged with 70 ministers in his district.

“He hasn’t lost touch, he just hasn’t been here,” Sheldon said, finding little fault with Dornan’s absence from the district. “Definitely his not being here all year didn’t help. But when he came, he came with all he had, and sometimes that makes up for it.”