Democrats Upbeat About O.C. Prospects

Charlie LaChance, wearing a union T-shirt and an infectious smile, sat amid Democratic Party posters and fliers and waited, as a spider for a fly, for unregistered voters to walk past her table at the Orange County Fair.

There weren’t many.

“I gotta tell you, the Republicans are giving away better stuff,” one fairgoer told her as she passed LaChance’s table, tucked between an information booth for the Freemasons and the door to the bathrooms.

“I know,” sighed LaChance. “They have more money.”

Such is life as a Democrat in Orange County, viewed nationwide as a spawning ground for right-wing zealots and a safe harbor for anti-government Libertarians.

But as Democrats gather in Los Angeles this weekend for the coronation of Al Gore as the party’s presidential candidate, Orange County Democrats say they have a renewed sense of purpose and optimism.

With the Clinton presidency ebbing into its final months, Democratic enrollments have surpassed 400,000 voters in the land where former President Richard M. Nixon is buried and where even the local airport bears the name of conservative idol John Wayne.

Orange County Democrats also have slowly been making electoral inroads, beginning with U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s (D-Garden Grove) defeat of conservative stalwart Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan four years ago. Two seats in the state Legislature also have since gone to Democrats from immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the central part of the county.

“I think the future is in our favor,” said county party chair Jeanne Costales. “We have a candidate in every seat this fall. We didn’t always in the past.”

Yet some party loyalists say it’s too soon to be counting electoral chickens in a county that has supported only two Democrats for president this century: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton.

Although Orange County has the third-largest number of Democrats in California--behind Los Angeles and San Diego counties--they remain outnumbered by Republicans by a 3-2 ratio. And the centralized structure of the Republican Party enhances its ability to raise money and remain strong during fallow political times.

“It all boils down to money,” explained Dorianne Garcia of Oceanside, a union activist and chair of the Democrats’ 73rd Assembly District Committee, which includes south Orange County. “The Republicans just have a lot more money, and we’re always playing catch-up.”

At least one longtime Democratic leader believes the fate of Gore’s presidential campaign ultimately will have more effect on local Democratic electoral success than the usual voter-registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns.

“Every time we’ve had a [Democratic] president in the White House, we’ve regained those central county seats,” said Howard Adler, who has been active in Orange County Democratic politics since the Eisenhower administration. “Democrats have to be successful with the presidency to have a successful Democratic Party in Orange County.”

And when Republicans are successful, Democrats find themselves cash-strapped, said Richard O’Neill, former state and local Democratic Party chairman.

Party faithful credit O’Neill, a developer and owner of El Adobe Restaurant in San Juan Capistrano, with single-handedly holding the party together in the 1960s and ‘70s--often drawing on his own wealth to do so.

Ironically, some of that wealth came from doing business with Republicans. The Nixons were steady customers at O’Neill’s restaurant when the president used a San Clemente estate as his Western White House.

“It’s been hard for the Democrats over the years to raise money when the Republicans have been in power,” O’Neill said, sitting in a leather El Adobe chair engraved with Pat Nixon’s name. “No Republicans would give you any money. They didn’t need to. They had their own people in power.”

Activists say the party’s future success here will grow from the area’s radically changing demographics. Caucasians will soon be the minority in the county, as they are in Los Angeles County, according to population projections.

Even more crucial is getting people engaged politically. Only 70% of all eligible voters now are registered to vote, and turnout among them ranges from 66% in off-years to 78% during presidential elections.

While those votes more often go to conservatives than moderates or liberals, there is evidence that Orange County voters aren’t as far right as their right-wing reputation. Annual surveys by UC Irvine researchers find that while most local voters consider themselves fiscal conservatives, a majority support such liberal bellwether issues as gun control, abortion rights and stricter environmental regulation.

Still, statewide propositions pushing conservative causes--from immigration reform to school voucher programs--receive far more support in Orange County than elsewhere, reflecting the political reality that local Republicans--particularly conservatives--vote more regularly than Democrats.

For example, Proposition 10, the 1998 initiative that raised cigarette taxes 50 cents per pack to fund early childhood development programs, passed with 50.5% of the vote statewide but received only 49% of the Orange County vote. And that same year Proposition 226, which would have made it difficult for unions to use members’ dues for political activities, was defeated statewide with 46.6% of the vote but carried 59.5% of the Orange County vote.

Adler said Orange County voters traditionally are more conservative than the county’s general population.

“I don’t think [elected conservatives] have ever represented the majority of the county,” he said.

“There’s a strange mixture of politics here,” added Frank Barbaro, a Santa Ana attorney whom fellow Democrats credit with sparking the party’s last surge of success in 1978, when they outnumbered Republicans by a thin margin.

“People tend to vote for the party that they belong to even though they maintain that they are staunchly independent. They cannot be looking at the records of the candidates, otherwise they wouldn’t be turning out for the people they are.”

Since that last Carter-era hurrah, Republican organizers have out-hustled the Democrats, largely under the leadership of controversial GOP Chairman Tom Fuentes.

A key turning point was a 1982 campaign for a newly drawn state Senate race in which Republican Ed Royce, then a politically unknown accountant, defeated Barbaro, former chair of the Orange County Democratic Party. The election was notable for the amount of money spent--more than $1 million--on a state legislative race, and for the use of vicious personal attacks by both Republicans and Democrats.

“It was a cheap-shot campaign,” recalled Barbaro. “It was symbolic from the standpoint that the dirty tricksters could win by dissemination of materials that weren’t close to being the truth.”

By then, the erosion in the Democratic Party was well underway, with enrolled Republicans outnumbering Democrats by 53,000 voters. It was followed by erosion among elected officials themselves.

In the aftermath of Reagan’s White House win, a parade of local Democrats switched party affiliation. Though most cited philosophical reasons, loyal Democrats saw opportunism. In an area increasingly dominated by Republicans, the perception was that political--and business--life would be easier as part of the Republican fold.

Among those who switched parties either before running for office or after winning office were County Clerk-Recorder Gary L. Granville; Dan Young, then mayor of Santa Ana and a former roommate of John Hanna, the Democratic Party chairman at the time; former County Supervisors Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner; Assemblywoman Marilyn C. Brewer (R-Newport Beach); and Jan Mittermeier, former county executive officer.

Wiley Aitken, chair of the Democratic Foundation, which funnels cash to campaigns and helps underwrite the county Democratic Party, said the defections simply heaped another challenge on party leaders. And, he added, politicians who found it easy to become Republicans weren’t strong Democrats in the first place.

“It was just something that had to be dealt with,” Aitken said before acknowledging that the party’s health would be better today had those Democrats stayed home. “We would have been in a much stronger position.”

Beyond that history, though, lies current reality. Democratic enrollment statistically remains about even with where it was nearly a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, Republican enrollment has grown by half, to more than 600,000, exceeding the county’s overall 40% growth in population.

Most of that growth has come in south Orange County, a booming area of new upscale neighborhoods that has lured Republican-heavy upper-middle-class white residents.

Kyle Crenshaw, a Newport Beach lawyer, has tried to stem the Republican tide as chairman of the Democratic Club of South Orange County, a local organization outside the party’s formal state structure.

Crenshaw hasn’t had much luck. Lately, though, he has detected a political softening as less socially conservative Republicans distance themselves from the hard-right rhetoric of some local GOP leaders.

“There’s a gradual attrition from the Republican Party toward independent third parties,” he said.

More Democrat-friendly people have moved into the county too, mostly among the booming Latino population in Santa Ana, Anaheim and other central and North County cities. Yet the county party has had limited success in organizing those potential new Democrats.

Part of the reason is their age.

From 1990 to 1998, the percentage of Orange County’s Latino population increased from 23% to 28%, according to population estimates by the state Department of Finance. Less than a third of those new residents were immigrants; the majority were newborns.

Rueben Martinez, a longtime Democratic activist and a Gore delegate to this year’s convention, believes the rise in the Latino population will infuse the Democratic Party with a new vitality. But getting those new Democrats to the polls will be the challenge.

“Common sense tells you that the Democratic Party is growing,” said Martinez, 61, owner of Martinez Books and Art, a Santa Ana bookshop and informal cultural center. “More Latinos are elected on the national level, and the majority of them are Democrats. When the lieutenant governor [Cruz Bustamente] is Latino, that’s going to help you with voter registration and get-out-the-vote programs. He is a very good role model.”

For rank-and-file volunteers, though, the battle for the county’s political soul boils down to connecting voters with issues.

LaChance, the table-sitter at the Orange County Fair, said party leaders need to capitalize on such basic concerns as health care and affordable housing. LaChance held herself up as an example. She works as an organizer for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324 in Buena Park. But she lives in Corona, in Riverside County, because she can’t afford a house in Orange County, where the median price for a single-family home is $273,000 and rising.

Doug Chappell, business manager for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 441 in Orange, said many of his local’s members also can’t afford to live where they work.

“A lot of our members who are Republican are just waking up to the fact that the people they’ve been supporting are not looking out for their best interests,” said Chappell, as he tried to register new voters at the fair.

While fairgoers sauntered past, the two activists talked about their own roles as unionists and Democrats amid the conservative riches of Orange County.

It’s been a challenging past, they agreed. And while the political future might belong to immigrants, the strength of the party will grow from recognizing them as fellow workers, not an ethnic group to be folded in.

“Democrats traditionally have taken family issues and social justice issues on at times when they are not popular,” LaChance said. “It is incumbent upon us to reach out to those workers and get them registered. Everyone is starting to wake up to the fact that what matters to people in Orange County is quality of life.”

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Times staff writer Jean O. Pasco contributed to this report.

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