Republicans rejoicing in Newport-Mesa

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT-MESA -- The rest of the nation may have been waiting anxiously

for election results Wednesday, but Orange County Republicans were

basking in the glow of resounding victories in local elections.

“I was very pleased” with the results of the state and federal races,

said county GOP chairman Tom Fuentes. “I think the energy was

phenomenal.”

Fuentes, who easily won his own election for a seat on the South

Orange County Community College board, called the Republican

get-out-the-vote effort “the best in history” and attributed part of

conservative candidates’ success to the election’s high turnout.

Republicans also had their built-in demographic advantage in the

county. Registered Republicans have outnumbered Democrats by a 3-to-2

margin in recent years, according to the county Registrar of Voters.

That advantage was more than enough to send Dana Rohrabacher

(R-Huntington Beach) and Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) back to

Congress, John Campbell to the state Assembly and Ross Johnson back to

the state Senate.

And though Democrats argued -- yet again -- that the politics of the

county had shifted to make Democratic runs more practical, the vote

showed little proof of their position.

Cox breezed to victory with 65.2% of the vote. Rohrabacher cruised

with 61.7%. Campbell had no trouble with 59.1%. And Johnson cleared away

the field with 59.7%.

“These liberal Democrats are always trying to fool themselves into

thinking they have a shot,” Rohrabacher said Wednesday.

“Every time for the last six elections I’ve had a liberal Democrat run

against me who claims that there’s some mystical tie between themselves

and the voters and that their views represent the voters and mine don’t.”

Even Democrat Ted Crisell, who hinged his campaign for Rohrabacher’s

45th District seat on an increase in Democratic voters, was singing a

sharply different tune on Wednesday.

“Unless there’s redistricting, you’d be hard-pressed, even spending a

million dollars, to take this guy out,” he said.

Rohrabacher, who spoke out strongly on election night against what he

called a Democratic attempt to “steal” Florida’s electoral votes in the

presidential election, reiterated his conviction that Bush had carried

the contest.

“We’ve won it,” he said, arguing that the confusion surrounding the

vote count in that state was nothing but “a ruse by the liberal media.”

“They’re part and parcel of the Democratic political machine,” he

said. “They’re trying to create doubt in the public mind to stall things

until someone can come up with a way of stealing the election.”

Campbell, too, said he was confident Bush would carry Florida and win

the White House.

“It looks really good,” Campbell said.

Fuentes also discounted any notion that a razor-thin Bush victory --

and apparent loss in the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore -- would

translate into no mandate for a Bush White House.

“Mandate is a rhetoric-type word,” Fuentes said. “Whoever has the

White House has the bully pulpit of the presidency and is able to utilize

it if one is an able leader. I don’t think the margin is going to be

consequential.”

More important, he said, would be “the reality of a Republican White

House complemented by a Republican Congress. Those factors mean real

potential for governance to change the agenda of America.”