Democrats strike gold.

California's new politics

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, it may be about to happen. Former Governor Pete Wilson is now blamed for an anti-Republican backlash among the state's Latino voters. Proposition 187, it should be remembered, had Wilson's strong support in 1994 and cut off various state services to illegal immigrants. It 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 Governor 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 in Berkeley of key players in the 1998 elections. He describes the G.O.P.'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, says Leslie Goodman, deputy chief of staff to Wilson. 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." The lesson, says this shrewd Republican veteran, is: "The era of preacher politics is over. People don't want ideologues wagging fingers in their faces."

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 Bill 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 this 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 in California. 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 three to two. And that netted the Democrats a two-point lift in the typical election.

Now, Latinos make up 14 to 15 percent of the electorate and are voting four-to-one Democratic, giving Democrats an eight to nine point boost. "That means that among the Anglo electorate, Republicans have to win by fifteen points to win an election," Maslin says.

To David Doak, a media consultant who, like Maslin, works for Davis, Republicans are "as lost culturally in terms of where the country is as the radical left was in the '60s and '70s." The "sea change since the height of Republican expansion in the Reagan years," Doak says, is that Democrats are now identified with "moderation," while Republicans "are becoming the narrower, more isolated party."

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.