Ventura County Leans Toward Political Center

For as long as almost anyone can remember, Ventura County has been a bastion of conservative politics.

The county has not sent a Democrat to Congress since World War II.

Voters favored Nixon, Ford and Reagan, then fell for Ross Perot.

But a new Los Angeles Times Poll--the most extensive so far on political attitudes in Ventura County--shows that while the county’s conservatism runs deep and wide, its residents edge toward the center of the political spectrum on a variety of social issues.

Four of every five county residents, for instance, say religion is important to them. But three of five also oppose teaching religious values in public schools because they don’t want to mix church and state.

And while opposition to abortion is often based on religious beliefs, most county residents support a Supreme Court decision that allows abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.

In Ventura County, 56% of residents say gay sex is always or almost always wrong. But nationwide that figure is 68%.

“The people in Ventura County are not as conservative as in the rest of the state and the nation,” said Susan Pinkus, director of The Times Poll. “When you consider issues such as abortion, homosexuality or teaching religious values in school, they look at things in a more personal way. And it changes how they feel.

“Abortion is a litmus test for anybody running for office these days,” Pinkus added, “but in Ventura County even the conservatives are split.”

Only 35% of Ventura County residents actually consider themselves conservatives, the poll found. That compares with 39% for Californians overall and 41% of all U.S. residents.

In conducting its survey, The Times Poll interviewed 1,286 adults in the county between Sept. 20 and 23. The margin of sample error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Politicians who have trolled the waters of county politics for decades say the poll confirms their beliefs that Ventura County’s conservatism has long steered away from extremes, and toward moderation and common sense.

“This county has always been conservative, even when it was heavily Democratic,” said former Rep. Robert Lagomarsino, a Republican state senator and congressman for three decades. “But I think a majority of the Republicans and a lot of the Democrats are also very pragmatic. They share mostly conservative values, but they’re not zealots.”

An indication of the county’s moderation is that just 11% of residents are white fundamentalist Christians, contrasted with 22% nationwide, the poll found. Likewise, about 16% of county residents are born-again Christians, while 25% are in that category throughout the United States.

“If you’re going to paint Ventura County with a broad brush, I would say it is moderate,” Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) said. “Simi Valley is going to be more conservative, and Ojai is going to be more liberal. But on a scale where four points is liberal and one is conservative, I’d say Ventura County is going to come out 1.9 or 2.0 overall.”

That is not to say Ventura County is not conservative at its core--with a stubborn independent streak thrown in for good measure.

After all, conservative reformer Perot took 27% of the local vote in his 1992 run for president, allowing Bill Clinton to snatch the county away from George Bush with a tiny plurality of 37%. Before that, no Democrat had won for president here since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

In recent years, Republicans have replaced Democrats as the county’s largest partisan bloc, because growth in white-collar eastern Ventura County has outstripped that in the blue-collar west.

Countywide, registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats 42.4% to 39.8%, with independents comprising an ever-larger share of the electorate. That breakdown is 44% Republicans and 29% Democrats in the east county, while Democrats have a 43% to 39% edge in the west, the poll found.

But confounding the conventional wisdom that stresses the social and economic differences between the two ends of the county, a nearly equal number of conservatives and Christian fundamentalists live in each area, the poll showed.

Likewise, Republicans hold five of the county’s seven seats in the state Legislature and Congress. But only three of those legislators could be considered staunch fiscal and social conservatives: Gallegly, state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) and Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge). And those lines blur, because even a conservative as notable as Gallegly insists he is a moderate on some social issues.

Indeed, Ventura County’s brand of conservatism is based less on ideology than on how issues affect the daily lives of residents.

Whether Republican or Democrat, The Times Poll shows support across-the-board for a handful of positions that form the county’s political bedrock: Residents here love cops and kids, support schools, and want to preserve the rich farmland and wide open spaces that still separate local cities and distinguish this county from the sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin.

They fear crime, see it as a growing threat, and some arm themselves with guns as a result.

They resent illegal immigrants, see them as a drain on public coffers and want to deny their children U.S. citizenship.

“I think there is universal support for family value and quality-of-life type issues,” said longtime Democratic strategist Kevin Sweeney, an executive at Patagonia Inc. in Ventura. “This county supports safety issues and focuses on education and what the community looks like.”

Law Enforcement Gets Residents’ Support

In making public policy, local officials have uniformly placed law enforcement as a top community priority. Poll respondents overwhelmingly endorsed such decisions.

By a 59% majority, they back a 1995 vote by the Board of Supervisors to guarantee steady increases to county law enforcement departments even if other basic services must be cut to offset that increase.

They rate only schools ahead of law enforcement when asked to list their top choices for government funding.

They rank crime and gangs as the biggest problems facing their communities today.

That was true even though Ventura County routinely ranks as the safest urban area in the West, and Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks are regularly listed among the three safest large cities in America on FBI reports.

County residents overwhelmingly agree their communities are safe--79% feel secure when walking the streets at night, compared with 68% of residents nationwide in a Times Poll last year. In a San Fernando Valley poll, 44% of the residents said they felt safe.

Eighty-two percent of local residents also believe their police forces do a good job. In Los Angeles, the approval rating was only 66% in an April poll.

But they fear crime, nonetheless. Consequently, 27 of every 100 Ventura County residents keep guns in their homes--about the same proportion as found across the state and the nation.

What that means here is that residents in nearly 63,000 homes are armed. And of those gun owners, 11%--or nearly 6,900--say they sometimes carry a loaded firearm in their car, and 6%--about 3,800--admit to occasionally packing a pistol on their bodies.

That contrasts with only a few hundred concealed weapons permits granted locally by police agencies.

Poll respondent Grant Grace, a Libertarian from south Oxnard, said he needs the pistol he carries beneath his car seat for protection.

“I’ve seen violence happen around me here,” said the 27-year-old pesticide company employee. He said he has pulled his gun just once during a street gang disturbance years ago, but never fired it.

“Besides,” he said, “I think it’s the duty of every American to have a firearm in their house. I think that was quite literally the intent of the Founding Fathers, so we could rise up and squash the government down if they didn’t govern right.”

Retired steamship company executive William Gilger, 72, also carries a loaded gun in his car, but only for long trips from his Simi Valley home to isolated places such as the mountains or deserts.

“When my wife and I got older, we figured they’d think, ‘Here’s two old farts out in the middle of the desert. Easy pickings.’ Well, we weren’t,” said Gilger, who sports a National Rifle Assn. sticker on his car bumper.

Gilger could be the prototypal east county resident.

He moved to Simi Valley seven years ago partly because of its reputation as being peaceful and well-policed. He considers himself a conservative Republican. But when it comes to teaching religious values in schools, he has reservations. Nor is he strongly opposed to abortion. And he thinks legal immigration is a positive.

“I’m conservative,” he said. “But I’m not fanatical.”

A Desire for Past Community Values

Political consultant John Davies, who has worked a number of local Republican campaigns, said there is no disputing Ventura County’s conservatism when it comes to support for law enforcement and opposition to new taxes.

“But on social issues they don’t lean any more conservative than surrounding counties,” said Davies of Santa Barbara. “A lot of that is being escapees from Los Angeles. That makes for people who are a little less knee-jerk when it comes to going to the hard-core conservative side, because they’re a little more open to issues and more independent.”

But if Ventura County shows its moderation on social issues, it still strongly embraces religion and displays a desire to recapture the community values of decades past.

Nearly two-thirds of residents say they are dissatisfied with moral values today, and insist that societal problems stem from divorce, unsupervised children and parents who fail to teach their children right from wrong.

Eighty-two percent of respondents say religion plays an important role in their lives--57% favor prayer in schools and 27% say they have prayed in support of a candidate or issue in recent years.

And while they oppose teaching religious or family values in schools, county residents favor a school voucher program that would allow parents to use tax money to send their children to the school of their choice, even if it were parochial or private.

They also overwhelmingly support creation of more charter schools that have a strict basic curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic and require strong parental involvement.

“The No. 1 issue in our county is education,” said Stephen Frank, president of the conservative National Federation of Republican Assemblies. “I think what makes this county conservative is that it’s more family oriented. Regardless of the issue, the debate always revolves around what is best for the family.”

Frank, whose wife, Leslie, is principal of a back-to-basics magnet elementary in Simi Valley, said all one has to do is consider enrollment in fundamental schools to gauge the true conservatism of Ventura County.

For instance, about 1,300 of Simi Valley’s 10,000 elementary students are enrolled in such magnets and about 200 more are on waiting lists, school officials said.

Frank notes another element of Ventura County politics that he insists is noteworthy--its political apathy.

Political Involvement Runs Behind in County

The Times Poll showed that 66% of respondents have done nothing political in the past four years--never donating money or time to a cause or even phoning a government official about an issue. Political participation is slightly less here than on the state and national levels.

Longtime Republican Party leader Carolyn Leavens said apathy may come from voters’ recognition that party labels don’t really mean much any more.

“Many of us in this county are realizing that moderate Republicans and Democrats share the same beliefs,” said Leavens, who came to Ventura in 1952 just in time to vote for Dwight Eisenhower.

“We are fiscally conservative and socially liberal or moderate,” she said. “And that covers about 75% to 80% of the electorate if you were to really get down and talk issues.”

Even state Sen. Wright, whose conservative credentials are unchallenged, said Ventura County is miscast as right-leaning and reactionary.

“The silent majority out there are not that conservative,” she said, “because being totally conservative causes you to be narrow-minded and hard-hearted.

“I consider myself to be conservative, right of Attila the Hun,” Wright cracked. “But maybe Attila the Hun has a little bit of a heart you never heard of.”

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Ventura County: Common-Sense Conservatism

A Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,286 Ventura County residents found a conservatism that runs deep and wide. But the county is not as conservative on many issues as the state or the nation.

Ventura County

Conservative: 35%

Liberal: 22%

Moderate: 25%

Don’t know: 18%

*

State

Conservative: 39%

Liberal: 29%

Moderate: 29%

Don’t know: 3%

*

U.S.

Conservative: 41%

Liberal: 25%

Moderate: 29%

Don’t know: 5%

****

*--*

Ventura U.S. Favor abortion rights 54% 51% Say gay sex is wrong 56% 68% Have guns in their homes 27% 28% Favor prayer in schools 57% 76% Say religion is important 82% 87% in their lives Say dissatisfied with 63% 77% moral values these days

*--*

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Life in a Changing County:

In its most extensive survey every of the political attitudes of Ventura County residents, the Los Angeles Times Poll found a conservative streak--a religious and law-and-order emphasis--but also a reluctance to mix church and state.

Politics

Ventura County

Republican: 43%

Democrat: 40%

Other and declined to state: 17%

*

State

Democrat: 47%

Republican: 37%

Other and declined to state: 16%

****

Religion

Religion important to their lives: 82%

Faith:

Protestant: 46%

Catholic: 36%

Jewish: 3%

Other: 6%

No Religion: 8%

*

White born-again Christians:

County: 16%

U.S.: 25%

*

White fundamentalist Christians:

County: 11%

U.S.: 22%

*

Religious issues:

Favor school vouchers

County: 54%

State: 41%

Say it’s a bad idea to teach religious values in public schools: 58%

Say family should teach family values, not schools: 66%

Favor charter “back-to-basics” schools: 69%

Prayed in support of candidate or issue: 27%

****

Law Enforcement / Safety

Approval of police in their community:

County: 82%

Los Angeles: 66%

*

Feel safe on walk:

County: 79%

U.S.: 68%

*

Worst problem in county:

Crime: 22%

Gangs: 20%

Bad Schools: 13%

Growth: 11%

Drugs: 11%

Say favor action that guaranteed law enforcement budget increases: 59%

Guns in home (about 63,000 homes): 27%

Of gun owners, those who sometimes carry guns in cars (About 6,800): 11%

Of gun owners, those who sometimes carry guns on selves (About 3,800): 6%

HOW THE POLL WAS CONDUCTED

The Times Poll contacted 1,286 adults in Ventura County by telephone September 20 through September 23. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the county. Random-digit dialing techniques were used so that listed and non-listed numbers could be contacted. The sample was weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, and education. The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for certain sub-groups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by other factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.

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About This Series

For the next four Sundays, “Life in a Changing County” ponders Ventura County’s policies and growth, as well as residents’ views on key issues of the day. The stories are based on a poll of 1,286 residents conducted in September. Today’s installment tells how the county’s reputation as a conservative stronghold may be overstated.