Changing Face of Farm Belt Makes It a Political Plum

By MARK Z. BARABAK

Aug. 18, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

FRESNO —

From a small stand up the road at the Stanislaus County Fair, Sunny Hollister helped change the face of California politics.

For the past 15 years, the 45-year-old Turlock Republican has manned the GOP’s red, white and blue fairground booth, registering 100 or so new Republicans each summer--and signing up as many as 500 in a really good year.

“A lot of them are Democrats who say they’ve always voted Republican and are just getting around to changing their registration,” said Hollister, a migrant from the Silicon Valley who has been a member of the Grand Old Party “since my mother pushed me around in a stroller.”

The Central Valley of yore, the Democratic bastion born of the New Deal and the westward movement of the dispossessed, is long gone.

Slowly but steadily, over the past 30 or so years, estrangement from the national Democratic Party and changes wrought by in-state migration have dramatically realigned politics in California’s vast midsection. Today, the Central Valley is the state’s single most competitive region--no lock for Democrat or Republican--making it California’s most coveted political prize.

Underscoring the region’s electoral import, the two major candidates for governor, Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Dan Lungren, will meet in Fresno tonight in the second of five debates scheduled before the Nov. 3 election. The 60-minute session is the first ever held in the heart of the valley and just one sign of the emphasis each campaign is placing on the region.

Both candidates have aimed their first--and so far only--TV advertising at the valley’s legion of free-floating “swing” voters. Last week, Lungren spent two days bumping along on a Bakersfield-to-Sacramento bus tour. Davis marched in 100-degree heat in Modesto’s Fourth of July parade and plans his own buscapade Wednesday.

Strategists for both camps agree that the race for governor could be decided here, in the fertile farm towns and mini-metropolitan areas spaced like so many place-settings along California 99.

Given the smothering summer, “Why else would these guys be spending so much time there?” said one Lungren advisor.

Each candidate approaches November with certain expectations. Davis is likely to carry the left-leaning San Francisco Bay Area by a huge margin and win big in Democratic Los Angeles. Lungren can count on running up the vote in Orange County and much of the rest of Southern California, though probably not the way Republicans used to, given Democratic inroads.

That makes the Central Valley pivotal, particularly for Lungren. A difference of just a few percentage points--perhaps just 100,000 votes either way--could prove decisive in a close contest.

Beyond the raw vote, the Central Valley is important symbolically, said Garry South, Davis’ chief strategist, as a sort of bellwether that reflects California’s moderately conservative leanings. “If a Democrat does well in the valley,” South said, “they’ll do well statewide.”

Sprawling more than 400 miles from Redding to the Grapevine, the valley takes in only about a fifth of California’s electorate, between 750,000 and 1 million voters, depending on turnout. But few other places have undergone the sort of seismic political shift witnessed here in the span of little more than a generation.

Beginning around 1932, and continuing for more than three decades, the Central Valley was California’s Democratic heartland, a party stronghold in an otherwise solidly Republican state. The migrants who arrived in the valley in the 1930s and 1940s from places like Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and the border states came bearing their Democratic heritage as well as their desperate dreams.

“Fundamentally,” said political demographer Tony Quinn, “the Central Valley became an extension of the Old South,” where affiliation with the Democratic Party, like economic status or hair color, was something acquired at birth.

As in the South, Democratic loyalties were firmly fixed in the Central Valley by the great public works of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which helped make the region what it is today: an epic triumph of man over nature, yielding the nation’s richest and most lucrative agricultural bounty.

Indeed, Democratic rule was so complete, it was possible as late as 1958 to drive from the Oregon border through the Central Valley and Inland Empire without leaving a Democratic-held congressional district. Today, with a bit of creative detouring, the same trip could be taken through unbroken GOP congressional turf. Along California 99, four of the five biggest cities in the valley now have Republican mayors.

But even at the height of single-party control, valley Democrats were always a distinct breed, more like their conservative Southern brethren than, say, urban counterparts in San Francisco or Los Angeles. The same social and political forces that turned the old Confederacy into today’s GOP bulwark--the civil rights movement, Democratic opposition to the Vietnam War, the counterculture movement--also hurt Democrats in the valley.

Bob Waterston, a 53-year-old fire captain and Clovis city councilman, calls John F. Kennedy a political hero. But he turned out last week to cheer Lungren at a Fresno stop, explaining that he left the Democratic Party in the 1970s, when he tired of “paying taxes to finance all the government giveaway programs.” “I had to take three jobs just to make ends meet,” he griped.

That disaffection with big government--at least as far as urban programs were concerned--grew widespread. After voting in huge numbers to reelect President Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, tens of thousands of valley voters abandoned Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey four years later, delivering George Wallace some of the highest percentages his pugnacious protest candidacy received anywhere in California. By 1972, the realignment in presidential politics was complete.

Ten years after that, when George Deukmejian and Tom Bradley were vying to replace Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., an old Nixon hand and Visalia native--Ken Khachigian--helped bring about a similar shift in statewide races.

By the end of his second term, Brown had grown hugely unpopular in the valley, thanks in no small part to his active support of the farm labor movement and other policies considered antithetical to the region’s lifeblood agriculture industry.

“We played off Jerry Brown,” said Khachigian, with Deukmejian stumping heavily in farm communities and campaigning as much against the outgoing governor and Cesar Chavez, late founder of the United Farm Workers union, as he did against his Democratic rival, then-Los Angeles Mayor Bradley.

In a breakthrough, Deukmejian carried the valley, a pattern Republicans have repeated in three gubernatorial campaigns since.

But politics alone, the tactical targeting by GOP strategists and the leftward lurch by Democrats can’t fully explain the valley’s political shift. The other major factor is migration, the same force that has shaped and reshaped the region in wave after wave going back to the Gold Rush.

Lately, the migrants flooding the valley have been urbanites, refugees from Southern California and the Bay Area seeking the slower paced, front-porch-swing and hail-fellow Rotarian lifestyle still attainable in the state’s rural interior. Not to mention the relatively cheap housing. In the late 1980s, for instance, 80% of new homes sales in Stanislaus County went to Bay Area commuters.

These newcomers, people like Republican recruiter Sunny Hollister, who arrived from San Jose 20 years ago, are reshaping the valley’s politics as surely as the Dust Bowl settlers half a century ago. Only this time, if the surge in Republican registration is any reflection, their philosophy is more free market than FDR, their emblem Dow Jones rather than Tom Joad.

“Often what you have are people trying to buy a first home, or looking for better schools, and financially they’re stretching,” said Carol Whiteside, the former Republican mayor of Modesto and head of the Great Valley Center, a regional public policy institute. “That makes them more sensitive to issues like taxes [and] government regulation, and that pushes them toward the conservative side of the agenda.”

Even so, for all the GOP gains of the past 30-odd years, the two major parties now stand at rough parity. Neither dominates the valley the way Republicans run Orange County, or Democrats rule the Bay Area. The county-by-county registration in the heart of the valley, in fact, is closer than just about anywhere else in California, about 45% Democrat to 40% Republican. And party affiliation aside, valley voters have proven notoriously tough to pin down.

In presidential politics, after a series of Republican blowouts in the 1970s and 1980s, the more centrist Bill Clinton wooed back huge numbers of valley voters in ‘92, helping Democrats carry the state for the first time in nearly 30 years. Clinton also ran well here in ’96.

Democrats are hopeful that Davis, a pro-death penalty Vietnam veteran, can match Clinton’s performance in November, at the very least holding down the Central Valley vote Lungren will probably need to offset big Democratic margins elsewhere. “It’s very competitive right now,” said Paul Maslin, a pollster for Davis, reflecting what other surveys have shown. “We’d like to keep it as close as possible.”

That ensures tonight’s focus on Fresno and the Central Valley won’t be a one-night stand.

“You can predict how L.A. will vote. You know what the Bay Area will do, what Orange County and San Diego will do,” said Whiteside. “But you can’t be certain what will happen in the valley. And politically, that’s what makes it such an interesting place.”

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The Center Shifts Right

A slow but steady decline in Democratic registration has drastically realigned the Central Valley, changing the state’s vast midsection from a Democratic bastion into the most competitive political region in California. A look at voter registration trends in nine counties in the heart of the Central Valley:

SAN JOAQUIN

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1970 1998 Dem. 58.1% 47.0% Rep. 37.7% 41.2%

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STANISLAUS

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1970 1998 Dem. 60.9% 48.8% Rep. 35.9% 36.8%

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MERCED

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1970 1998 Dem. 63.7% 54.7% Rep. 32.6% 31.9%

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