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The power of Orange County’s GOP contingent reached its peak in 1996. The party’s rise was chronicled in a five-day series that showed the extent of its influence.

AWARDS

Orange County Press Club

1st Place: Project Series

1st Place: Political Writing

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Reign of the O.C. Republicans

By ERIC BAILEY, PETER M. WARREN and DEXTER FILKINS

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

July 7, 1996

Out on Orange County’s hot political blacktop, Republicans play hard and for keeps. No sissies or whiners allowed. Payback is hell.

Just ask Todd R. Thakar. Back in 1992, the Republican attorney had the temerity to challenge state Sen. John R. Lewis, a GOP fixture in America’s conservative heartland. Thakar, a moderate, was warned to stay out. He ran anyway and lost big.

Lewis didn’t forget Thakar’s impudence. Two years later, the Orange conservative engineered a measure of revenge, thwarting confirmation of Thakar’s mother, a wealthy GOP donor, to the California State University board. Concluded a Republican colleague: “Lewis is mad at the kid.”

Such hardball tactics are de rigueur in Orange County, where a cadre of conservatives so dominates politics that outsiders stand virtually no chance. Foes call them a machine, the “‘Orange County Mafia,” and bitterly assert that their methods often cross the line, restricting political participation to handpicked loyalists. But even their harshest critics can’t dispute their success.

Now, these conservative forces are extending their influence throughout California, providing the muscle for a Republican resurgence and branding the state GOP with a mix of free-market philosophy and conservative social values. Already, many analysts describe the Orange County squad as perhaps the most potent force in state politics today.

Just look at the people who occupy California’s political power slots.

There is Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, whose tenacity and ambition finally landed him the Assembly’s top job--the speakership--earlier this year. In the state Senate, manufacturer Rob Hurtt, also representing Garden Grove, is the upper house’s GOP leader and, with Pringle, commander of Republican strategy heading into November’s election. Michael J. Schroeder of Irvine, an attorney and aggressive conservative activist, is expected to ascend to the chairmanship of the California Republican Party next year.

“‘Right now, the center of the political universe is Garden Grove,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the Claremont Graduate School. “‘It’s quite astounding. They are driving the political and policy agenda of this state.”

Orange County, birthplace of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 and the backbone of the volatile school vouchers initiative, also is an invaluable gold mine for Republican candidates up and down California.

Hurtt, together with Irvine banking scion Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. and a few like-minded Southern California friends at the free-spending California Independent Business PAC, has given an astonishing $8.6 million to GOP candidates and causes since 1991.

Their reach has been wide. Almost two-thirds of the Republicans in the Assembly have received significant financial help from Hurtt or the political action committee, which has become a pillar of the religious right. In the state Senate, half the Republicans have benefited from their largess.