GOP Out to Fathom Mystery of the 78th : But Democrats Also Will Move Early to Hang On to Killea’s Assembly Seat

Doug Yoakam tried to fathom the 78th State Assembly District and failed.

“This is not a district where you can say ‘OK, this is an (even) district,’ ” said Yoakam, a Republican campaign consultant who ran attorney Earl Cantos’ unsuccessful 1986 race against Democrat Assemblywoman Lucy Killea of San Diego. “You just can’t say that. There are so many people there who aren’t really there any more.”

Yoakam isn’t the only one perplexed by the 78th, a compact little district that has the highest percentage of Republican voters of any state Assembly district still held by a Democrat.

By traditional measures, the district should have fallen into the Republican column in November. The district voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Deukmejian in 1986. After a fierce battle between the two major parties a year ago, Republican voter registration drew nearly even with the Democrats’, a condition that normally spells Republican victory because GOP voters tend to be more loyal and turn out to vote in greater numbers.

But Killea won easily over Cantos last year, and now both parties have already set their sights on the district for 1988. The district remains the only one in San Diego County considered winnable by either party, and neither side intends to wait long before starting the battle again.

The 78th is a key part of the state Republicans’ strategy for taking over the Assembly. With a win there and in four other districts, the GOP would take a majority of the seats in the House and be in position to redraw district lines after the 1990 census, a crucial step toward controlling California politics for years to come.

The Republicans will begin registering voters in the district May 1, party leaders say, more than a year before the next Assembly primary.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are laying the groundwork for a major effort of their own beginning May 30, when they will send f as many as 200 volunteers into a Hillcrest neighborhood to register and educate voters in their homes.

But if the 1986 results showed anything, it was that the party registration numbers tell only part of the story.

Capturing the district will always be difficult for Republicans as long as the incumbent is Killea, a moderate former city councilwoman who is popular with the district’s liberal voters and rarely offends her more conservative constituents. When Killea steps down--she has said she will run for reelection in 1988--Republican leaders say, the district will become their No. 1 target.

Even without Killea, however, strategists for both parties believe the district has traits that may stymie Republican efforts to win it.

“It’s a much more moderate district,” said Assemblyman John Lewis of Orange, one of the Republicans’ top political planners. “The Democrats tend to be more liberal, the independents tend to be more liberal, and the Republicans tend to be much more moderate.”

But the district’s most confounding characteristic, Lewis and others agree, is that its residents move so often that reaching them, much less influencing them, is difficult.

At first glance, the district appears fairly homogeneous, with many stable communities. Contained entirely within San Diego, the 78th’s boundary stretches from Pacific Beach through Clairemont to Interstate 15, then south to the San Diego State University area and back through the mid-city communities to Ocean Beach on the coast again.

The district has few of the very wealthy--its boundaries stop just short of La Jolla and Point Loma. The stately Mission Hills homes overlooking Old Town and Mission Valley are its only brush with pretension.

Yet neither does the 78th District include many of the very poor. The district lines go no further south than Balboa Park, and its only pocket of low-income residents is in Linda Vista, where the Southeast Asian community forms the only significant non-white population in a district that is overwhelmingly Anglo.

“There is no great wealth or abject poverty,” Killea said of her turf. “It’s a transition area.”

Yet nearly two-thirds of the district’s residents are renters, and the average age of about 30 is the lowest in the state Assembly. Hundreds of young singles live in the rows upon rows of apartments and condominiums that carpet the floor of Mission Valley. Thousands more live in the district while attending classes at San Diego State University, the University of San Diego or UC San Diego, which is only a few miles from the district’s northern limit. The area also includes Mesa College and borders the San Diego City College community.

Younger Set Moving In

In the mid-city communities of Normal Heights and North Park, where most of the houses and many of the residents date from before World War II, homes left vacant by deaths or moves are being rented to younger couples and singles. Others are razed and replaced by apartment and condominium buildings.

In Cantos, a 30-year-old lawyer from Kensington, the Republicans thought they had just the candidate who could knock Killea, 64, out of the seat she has held since 1982. One party leader called Cantos “the perfect yuppie for a yuppie district,” and with that in mind, the party spent more than $240,000 on his campaign.

But Cantos wasn’t perfect, at least in 1986. Killea took 56% of the vote, beating the upstart in every corner of the district. She won comfortably in the Republican areas of Pacific Beach, Clairemont and Serra Mesa and piled up huge majorities in the Democratic communities of Hillcrest, North Park and Normal Heights.

“I thought it was a winnable race,” said Yoakam, the consultant who ran the Cantos campaign. “We discovered that it was tougher than we thought.”

Yoakam said he ran a traditional campaign in a district that is not traditional at all. Seduced by the favorable registration gains the GOP had made in recent years, the Republicans failed to realize that many of those they had registered had already moved or had no intention of voting. They were phantoms.

On election day, turnout in the district was low--about 50%--and fewer Republicans than Democrats went to the polls, a phenomenon almost unheard of in a district with even registration. When the registrar of voters’ office purged its rolls after the election, the 78th District lost more than 23,000 voters who had moved or died since they last registered. Another rarity: More Republicans than Democrats were stricken from the rolls.

Those who did vote reflected not party loyalty but an independent streak that confounded political analysts.

For example, though the district’s voters were reelecting Democrat Killea in November, they also gave a resounding edge to Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, who endorsed Killea’s opponent.

The district voted overwhelmingly for President Reagan in 1984, but two years later, it gave a majority to Reagan’s arch political enemy--U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston.

The voters in the 78th sided with the state’s more liberal element in approving Proposition 65 on the November ballot--the clean-water initiative--and rejecting Proposition 64, which would have set up new rules for regulating the behavior of patients stricken with the deadly disease AIDS. But they voted with conservatives when they approved Proposition 63--which made English the official language of California--and rejected California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird.

Nell Piper, a longtime Republican volunteer who is chairwoman of the Republican Central Committee’s 78th District caucus, blames the district’s unpredictable nature on its large number of young people and renters.

“It’s not a lack of loyalty, it’s a lack of interest,” Piper said. “They’ll register and agree that they are Republicans, but then they don’t go and vote. . . . Many of them do not know the principles of either party.”

David Rodriguez, a Killea campaign worker who has done registration work, expressed similar frustrations.

“I’ve been doing registration for four or five years now, and we never seem to make a lot of ground,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like swimming against the tide. They move out just as fast as we register them.”

The flip-side of the same problem shows up in duplicate registrations, people who move within the district and re-register but whose names also show up at an outdated address.

“I think we register people two and three times down there,” Yoakam said. “I think that accounts for all the big numbers.”

But like the superpowers arms race, neither side believes it can afford to let the other gain a numerical advantage--even if those numbers don’t always hold up on election day.

The Republicans will begin registering new voters May 1 at such sites as supermarkets, shopping centers and the Sports Arena swap meet. “We’ll be wherever we know there will be a lot of foot traffic,” Piper said.

A Different Strategy

The Democrats, using a different strategy, will hit the streets a month later in a door-to-door recistration and education campaign that Democratic Chairwoman Irma Munoz predicted will be more effective than the registration blitz before the 1986 election. The effort will begin in the 78th but soon will expand to the rest of the county, Munoz said.

Munoz said recent registration efforts--particularly those involving professional signature gatherers--have done a “very sloppy job of registration.” This drive will use volunteers from organized labor, senior citizens and student groups, among others, to register people in their homes and attempt to persuade them to become active members of the Democratic Party.

“People who are being paid a bounty to register voters are not committed to any party,” Munoz said. “They’re committed to earning money. All they want is that person’s name, address and signature. We’re going beyond that.”

Munoz, who has pledged to reinvigorate her party’s local structure, knows that her first partisan test will come next year in the 78th, when Cantos is expected to challenge Killea again.

“We don’t want to lose it,” Munoz said. “I don’t think we will.”