Calm 36th District Race Belies Seat’s Importance

Looking at the campaigning for the pivotal open seat in Los Angeles County’s 36th Congressional District, anybody but a political junkie would find it hard to believe just how badly both major parties want to win here.

The main contenders in the Venice-to-San Pedro coastal district--Democrat Janice Hahn and Republican Steve Kuykendall--have stuck to the issues and, at least so far, avoided the bitter attacks that have begun surfacing in other hot races as election day draws near. Nor have they been blitzing voters with slews of campaign mailers and telephone calls.

“It’s been unusually polite, but also incredibly light,” said South Bay political consultant Tom Shortridge, a Republican veteran of many campaigns in the area.

There are several reasons for the low-key nature of the race: the centrist politics of the district; the moderate, mainstream views of the candidates; and wariness about how voters will react to the presidential sex scandal and ensuing impeachment efforts by the GOP-dominated Congress.

“This is a very fragile election cycle,” Kuykendall said, referring to the “activities in Washington,” as he waited for Gov. Pete Wilson at a Torrance hotel earlier this week. The governor was the keynote speaker at a fund-raising luncheon for Kuykendall, currently an assemblyman and former City Council member in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Both parties have rallied around their candidates, who are running for one of three open seats in the 52-member California delegation. They are providing contributions, mounting independent efforts on their behalf and sending their leaders to lend fund-raising and other support.

President Clinton attended a fund-raiser for Hahn in a Westside home Saturday night, and she also has had help from party luminaries Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Former Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas stumped for Kuykendall a couple of weeks ago, and on Thursday, six GOP congressmen held a news conference at the assemblyman’s Torrance campaign headquarters to highlight the importance of a Kuykendall victory to party efforts to keep control of the House.

“In terms of taking a Democratic seat, this is in the top five or six” of GOP prospects around the nation, Rep. John Linder, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said at Kuykendall’s headquarters.

Although the seat has been held for three terms by Democrat Jane Harman, who gave it up for a failed bid for governor, the district has definite Republican leanings. It favored Wilson over Democrat Kathleen Brown by a nearly 2-1 margin in the 1994 governor’s race and went for Republican Mike Huffington over Feinstein that same year. Registration is nearly even between the two main parties, with Democrats holding a 4,000-vote edge. Nearly one-fifth of the district’s 334,000 voters are not affiliated with either party.

Republicans say that their polls have shown Kuykendall consistently ahead throughout the race, but declined to provide details. Hahn’s campaign, however, has a poll taken over a three-day period last week that shows the race neck and neck; the survey of 405 registered voters, by Santa Monica-based Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin and Associates, found 31% support for Hahn, 30% for Kuykendall, 5% for other candidates and 34% undecided. The survey had a margin of error of 4.9 points.

“I hear that Kuykendall’s ahead, but I also hear it’s a tight race,” said GOP consultant Shortridge, noting that the get-out-the-vote efforts will be key in a district and election year “where the average voter just doesn’t care. . . . There is no burning issue [here] and nothing on the national level to drive [voters] out there right now.”

Joseph Scott, another veteran political strategist who lives in the district, said Hahn and Kuykendall are “both in a race for the center” in a politically moderate district, and that makes it hard for them to define themselves to voters.

“The moderation factor probably works more for Kuykendall than for Hahn,” said Scott, who has been involved in campaigns on both sides of the political aisle.

Scott contrasted the race for the 36th District with the intensely personal, high-profile rematch in Orange County between liberal Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and her predecessor, conservative icon Robert K. Dornan. The two “polar opposites” have drawn ideologues from around the country to help make this the most expensive ($6-plus million) House race in the country this year.

But Hahn and Kuykendall agree on most of the issues important to voters in this swing district. They support abortion rights, want improvements in public schools, favor controls on assault weapons and cheap handguns, and talk about ways to protect the environment in the pro-environment, public safety-conscious, fiscally conservative district. With its middle-class electorate, the 36th is exactly the kind of district both parties need in their struggle for control of Congress.

Hahn, the daughter of the late longtime county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, one of the area’s most beloved political figures, and brother of Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn, was elected to a commission to overhaul Los Angeles’ complicated City Charter.

A divorced mother of three, on leave from her job with the Southern California Edison Co., Hahn said she can do a better job representing people “who are struggling just to make it through the day.”

She has called for “meaningful” health care reform regarding HMOs and has criticized the current Congress for spending the budget surplus instead of putting it toward keeping the Social Security system solvent.

Hahn has taken some swipes at Kuykendall, including hammering away at his acceptance of a last-minute, $125,000 contribution from tobacco giant Philip Morris when he first ran for the Assembly in 1994. But Kuykendall moved to neutralize the issue by refusing to take tobacco interest donations since then and by citing a list of anti-tobacco votes in a campaign mailer signed by area doctors and dentists.

Her attacks, however, have been directed at issues and at Kuykendall’s record--nothing personal. Kuykendall so far has kept his message focused on his goals and accomplishments and refrained from sniping at Hahn.

Kuykendall’s campaign has focused on his personal background, his history of community involvement (including serving as president of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Education Foundation) and achievements during his four years in the Assembly.

A former Marine who served in Vietnam, Kuykendall was a mortgage banker before his 1994 election to the Assembly. He and his wife, Jan, a physical therapist, have a daughter who is a Navy pilot and two sons, one in college, the other in high school.

In the Legislature, Kuykendall co-authored the state’s version of Megan’s Law, enabling community members to learn about the presence of repeated sex offenders in their communities and wrote the Tyler Jaeger Act, which stiffened penalties for fatal child abuse.

Kuykendall also touts his cutting of his office and Assembly operating budgets and his helping to get funds for South Bay wildlife habitat restoration and for the cleanup of Santa Monica Bay. He knows those are the kinds of issues that resonate with district voters.