Columnist E.J. Dionne: This may be GOP’s start of something bad

Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1999 | 10:41 a.m.

BERKELEY, Calif. -- If California is still the place where the future happens first, Republicans may want to bring back the past. In Ronald Reagan's political homeland, the Republican Party is in a fix.

It's said of the Chicago Cubs that every team has a bad century. For California Republicans, this has been a bad decade. In the 1990s, the only Republican who has been successful at the top of the ticket is former Gov. Pete Wilson -- and he is now blamed for an anti-Republican backlash among the state's Latino voters.

Proposition 187, which cut off various state services to illegal immigrants and had Wilson's strong support in 1994, galvanized a surge of Latino voter registration and gave Latinos a hard shove into Democratic arms.

In the meantime, white voters have abandoned the party of Reagan in droves. Some were pushed away by the Republicans' strong anti-abortion stand and the influence of Christian conservatives on the party. Others were drawn to the Democrats on environmental issues.

Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, a landslide winner last year over Republican Dan Lungren, made education the cornerstone of his campaign. And gun control has turned into a big Democratic winner among both urban and suburban voters. They see tougher gun laws as one more weapon in the anti-crime arsenal.

Bruce Cain, associate director of the University of California's Institute of Governmental Studies, recently hosted a conclave here of key players in the 1998 elections. He describes the GOP's problem this way: "You're losing the whites with your social agenda and you're losing the Latinos with your racial and ethnic agenda. You can't do both of these things and win."

Conversations with Republican and Democratic operatives alike suggest this is a consensus view.

A moralistic tone is hurting Republicans, Leslie Goodman, deputy chief of staff to Wilson, says. In 1998, "You had the sense that the Republican Party was the judgmental party or the judging party, and the Democrats were the helping party."

Richard Dresner, who polled for Lungren and the California Republican Party, is one Republican consultant who'll say publicly what others in his tribe say privately: The impeachment of President Clinton has been a disaster for his party.

"When 60 to 70 percent of the people don't want government to do something, they look at the people doing it and say a pox on your house," he says. Dresner thinks some Republicans stayed home last fall out of "disgust with the impeachment process and the association of Republicans with it."

Dresner argues that 1998 shattered four presumptions that once anchored Republican dominance here. It was assumed that Republicans were more likely to vote than Democrats. That wasn't true in '98.

Democrats are usually more willing than Republicans to bolt their party. Last year, the cross-party hemorrhaging sent Republican votes to Davis. In the past, Republicans counted on a reasonable share of the Latino vote -- perhaps a third to 40 percent. They won less than 20 percent against Davis.

Finally, no one expected the explosive growth in Latino voting that happened after the Prop 187 campaign. Democratic pollster Paul Maslin explains the new California math: In the 1980s, Latinos made up about 7 percent of the state's electorate and voted Democratic by about 3-to-2. And that netted the Democrats a 2-point lift in the typical election.

Now, Latinos make up about 15 percent of the electorate and are voting 4-to-1 Democratic, giving Democrats an 8- to 9-point boost. "That means that among the Anglo electorate, Republicans have to win by 15 points to win an election," Maslin says.

One bad spell doesn't make a trend, and both Dresner and Goodman see openings for a Republican comeback. California's open primary -- it allows all voters to cast ballots in the primary of their choice -- could "give us our most electable candidates," Goodman says.

And Davis will have to deliver on his promise to improve the public schools, Maslin warns. "If he fails, Lord knows what happens -- it could be vouchers, the collapse of the public school system, who knows what."

Still, the prospect that the largest state in the union could become a Democratic bastion just might concentrate the Republican mind.