California House Race Shapes Up As a Duel of Interest Groups

By Alan Greenblatt, CQ Staff Writer

Some of the outside interest groups that helped California Democrat Walter Capps win a House seat in 1996 plan to reprise their role in the eight-week selection dance that will choose his successor March 10.

Democrats hope the winner will be Capps' widow, Lois, who collected 45 percent of the vote in the Jan. 13 special primary election in the California 22nd District. Having fallen short of an outright majority, Capps must now face state Rep. Tom Bordonaro, whose 29 percent share of the overall vote was best among Republicans on the all-party ballot.

Walter Capps, who died Oct. 28, won his one term largely on the strength of more than $1 million spent to boost his cause by labor unions, environmental groups and abortion rights organizations. The same groups are expected to weigh in for Lois Capps in the weeks ahead. They include the AFL-CIO and EMILY's List, which were in the district in recent weeks.

Most of the independent spending before the Jan. 13 vote was concentrated on the Republican side, where the duel between Bordonaro and rival state Rep. Brooks Firestone attracted national activists on abortion, taxes and term limits. These groups in aggregate spent at least $325,000 attempting to influence voters.

That money paid for television and radio ads, fliers, phone banks and other voter mobilization efforts sponsored directly by the outside groups, and came on top of about $1.2 million raised by the candidates themselves.

The 22nd District hugs the coast for more than 100 miles from Santa Barbara north to include Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo as well. Walter Capps was the first Democrat in a half century to carry the area.

Since Lois Capps had no Democratic rival Jan. 13, the biggest battle took place along Republican lines.

At candidate forums in the district, voters were more likely to ask about education or local coastal developments than abortion or gun control.

Nonetheless, considerable campaigning was conducted on those issues by several prominent national organizations. These included groups that reported their independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). But there were also "issue advocacy" expenditures by groups that did not have to report under federal law because they did not explicitly advocate a vote for (or against) a specific candidate.

Firestone appeared to have the proper moderate credentials on social and environmental issues to carry the 22nd in a general election. Heir to a tire fortune and friends with former President Gerald R. Ford, Firestone also received an early recruiting call from House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who persuaded him to abandon plans to run for lieutenant governor.

Bordonaro, who has said he would not vote for Gingrich as Speaker, did not have the money to buy much attention for his campaign. He did receive $1,000 contributions from at least 14 GOP House members, but his FEC filing prior to the primary showed he had raised just $131,700.

Firestone spent more than $400,000 of his own money on the effort, and also outraised Bordonaro among individual contributors.

But Bordonaro was greatly aided by interest groups that helped spread his views. For instance:

Firestone finally ran a response ad of his own, in which he said he would have voted for a modified version of a state ban on the procedure.

Campaign for Working Families is planning to return to the 22nd District race for the March 10 vote. And it has said it will run versions of its ad in at least 27 other House races this year.

"That validated all the other accusations that were out there, that Brooks was too liberal for this district and the California Republican Party," said Wayne C. Johnson, a GOP consultant who works for the group.

The guides highlighted the candidates' positions on social issues from abortion and the death penalty to same-sex marriages. But they did not explicitly tell voters which way to vote.

"Probably the major factor [for Bordonaro] was the Christian Coalition and Catholic Alliance voter guides that got dumped in the last few weeks," said Eric Smith, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Peter Dickinson, co-executive director of Campaign for Working Families, criticized the distinction federal law makes between his group's responsibilities and those of others.

"We're the ones who came out; we're fully disclosed, we're subject to federal limits," Dickinson said. "These other groups, you can't see who gave them the money to run this campaign."

"Call Bordonaro"

Among the groups that did not have to disclose their contributors or the amount they spent was Americans for Limited Terms. This Wisconsin-based group spent $90,000 airing an ad that said Bordonaro supported term limits but refused to sign a pledge limiting himself to three terms. (Firestone and Lois Capps both signed the pledge.)

The group's ad, echoed in a separate $7,000 radio ad campaign sponsored by the Washington-based U.S. Term Limits, depicted a shell game, which it called a "favorite of politicians," and urged voters to call Bordonaro and "tell him you're not buying." But the ad never told voters how to vote.

Similarly, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which supports abortion rights, spent $40,000 on phone banks and a voter guide that said "Tom Bordonaro is the definition of a religious political extremist." But the flier did not literally tell people to vote against him.

Since the race will continue for another eight weeks between two ideologically polar candidates, the outside groups are not likely to turn off their spigots any time soon.

"We'll be meeting this week to see how we can pursue a strategy in the second round to ensure that Tom Bordonaro is elected March 10," Dickinson said on Jan. 14.

Now that the fighting is exclusively interparty, many groups associated with the Democratic Party, such as the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club, will step up their independent expenditure campaigns in behalf of Capps.

Labor unions already gave heavily to Capps' primary campaign and promoted her candidacy to their members via phone, mail and in-person canvassing.

"We'd been very involved in 1996 and were able to gin that up again this time around," said Amy Chapman, the AFL-CIO's assistant political director.

Saturday Jan. 17, 1998

• A Bundle From Virginia
• House GOP Casts a Wide Net In Renewed Scandal Hunt
• Rainy Days Get No Respect As Savings Rate Droops
• Rep. Riggs To Run For Senate
• Special Race in New York's 6th To Feature Dueling Democrats
• Another Costly Run May Prove Too High a Price for Feinstein
• Criticism of 'Corporate Welfare' Heats Up in Congress
• Departure of Bureau's Director Deepens Census Controversy
• California House Race Shapes Up As a Duel of Interest Groups
• Political Advocacy Case Reaches High Court