Watching and Waiting in Close House Race

Call it Florida West. While the world focuses on the Sunshine State to learn whether George W. Bush or Al Gore will occupy the White House, two candidates from Long Beach are waiting out ballot counts closer to home.

Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Horn was clinging to a narrow lead this week in the strongly Democratic 38th Congressional District, updated Los Angeles County election results showed. But his Democratic challenger, Gerrie Schipske, was hanging on to hope that the unknown number of uncounted ballots could still bring her the seat in the House of Representatives.

“I still think there is a chance that we will prevail,” said Schipske, an attorney, nurse-practitioner and part-time university teacher.

When the election night counting ended in the wee hours of Nov. 8, Horn appeared to have won a fifth term by 1,616 votes. But the narrow margin and the uncounted absentee and provisional ballots were enough to keep Schipske from conceding and Horn supporters from declaring victory.

They both have been through this sort of thing before. Horn won the 1992 Republican primary by 105 votes. In 1996, Schipske came within about 1,200 votes of knocking off a Republican legislator in the overlapping 54th Assembly District after sweating out the final count.

Elsewhere in California, one other race remained a nail-biter more than two weeks after election day, according to the secretary of state’s office. That is in the San Joaquin Valley’s open 5th State Senate District, where, as of Wednesday, Democratic Assemblyman Michael J. Machado led Republican Alan S. Nakanishi, a Lodi city councilman, by 611 votes out of 290,787 counted.

In every big election, there are ballots that do not get counted until days or even weeks after the polls close, either because they were absentees that were not tabulated on election night or because they were damaged and could not go through a counting machine or because there was some question as to their validity. Those ballots are examined, and the legitimate ones are counted and added to the tally, before the county Board of Supervisors certifies the election.

Statewide, 182,253 ballots remained to be counted as of late Tuesday, said Shad Balch, spokesman for Secretary of State Bill Jones. Of those, 33,648 were in Los Angeles County, but it could not be determined how many were from which districts. Counties have until Dec. 5 to certify their elections, and the state has until Dec. 16 to do so.

As the counting continues and local election officials issue periodic updates, Horn and Schipske can do nothing but watch and wait. He seems a lot more laid-back about the circumstances than she does. Horn made a trip back to Washington for several days for some congressional business. Then, with his wife and son, Horn went to Phoenix to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with his daughter and grandson.

“I don’t think about it much,” Horn said Wednesday of the continuing ballot count, adding that he expects to be returned to Washington.

His son and campaign manager, Steve Horn. Jr., nonetheless keeps close tabs on the count while his father goes about his usual routine.

“It’s out of our hands,” Horn Jr. said. “Unlike the Florida situation, this is nothing unusual. There are no teams of lawyers, no court cases. We are simply waiting for them to finish counting the ballots.”

Once the tallying is done, the losing candidate can get a recount but must pay for it unless it changes the election’s outcome. In congressional races, the outcomes usually do not change if more than a few hundred votes separate the candidates by the the time the tally is complete, experts say. Schipske has not ruled out a recount.

“It’s painful, and my emotions run the gamut” from hope to discouragement with each update, Schipske said Wednesday from her Long Beach home. She sorted through materials brought from her now-disbanded campaign headquarters, fielded phone calls from supporters eager for updates and wrote thank-you notes to contributors and volunteers.

The latest update, on Tuesday, showed some Schipske gains over previous tallies, but overall she has lost ground since election night, and Horn’s lead stood at 1,999 of the 178,518 counted.

While not giving up, Schipske said she is concentrating on getting back to the normal rhythms of her life--taking her children to and from school, making lesson plans for the government classes she teaches at Cal State Long Beach and beginning her holiday preparations.

She takes heart from telephone calls from several California Democratic House members--including Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Henry Waxman of Los Angeles and Grace Napolitano of Montebello, who won her 1998 race when 600 late-count ballots put her over the top. And Schipske delights in a warm note she recently received from President Clinton--who was special guest at a fund-raiser for her--and from the help she got from organized labor and a large group of campaign volunteers.

She chuckles over a horoscope downloaded from the Internet and sent by her former campaign manager, that reads “Decisions go down to the wire. . . . While things look iffy . . . you gain the upper hand. . . . Somebody clears the path for you to get a second chance.”

But she and her supporters wonder whether things would have turned out differently if national Democratic leaders had given her the same level of help bestowed on former Rep. Jane Harman, state Sen. Adam Schiff and Assemblywoman Susan Davis, all of whom beat Republican incumbents. Democrats, with maximum efforts from national and state party leaders, also captured an open seat in the Bay Area and fended off a strong Republican challenge in the San Joaquin Valley.

If the race doesn’t end up in her corner this time, Schipske made it plain that she will run for the seat again, even though the district will be redrawn after the census is tabulated and will probably attract many strong Democratic candidates.

“If for some reason this doesn’t go our way, I am going to declare immediately for the next time,” Schipske said. “We came awfully close, and I believe I will have some very strong support to do this again.”