CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS ’92 : Left at the Gate : With Little Campaign Money, Long Shots Are in the Race but Out of the Running

U.S. Senate candidate Bill Allen arrived late at the poolside tea party, was rushed to a shady area beneath a towering oak tree, and was promptly introduced to the Bel-Air gathering of Republican women as a candidate for U.S. attorney.

His hostess quickly corrected the error, but no sooner had Allen taken command of the card-table lectern when the woman tripped and nearly toppled into the pool.

Allen did not miss a beat. His next speech was more than an hour away in Oxnard, and his months on the campaign trail--evidenced by his aching feet squeezed into soft-soled Birkenstock shoes--had taught him the show must go on.

It has been a long and frustrating primary season for candidates such as Allen, an underfinanced underdog in the Republican race for the two-year Senate seat. While the major candidates from both parties wage what one critic called “stealth campaigns,” a handful of long-shot candidates have been tirelessly crisscrossing the state as often as their meager campaign treasuries will allow.

Yet the lesson from California’s campaign trail has been a harsh and simple one: Old-fashioned stumping does not work. A can-do attitude and a lot of hustle just are not good enough in 1992. In a state with more than 30 million people and 159,000 square miles, knocking on doors, shaking hands, making speeches and sipping tea do not do much good unless the candidate can also raise lots of money and buy television advertising.

“They come around every election,” said Republican political consultant Alan Hoffenblum. “They watch Robert Redford in ‘The Candidate’ and they think they are experts on how to run a campaign. . . . They will rob their piggy bank to run one billboard in a city where you need 10 billboards. In a state like California, you need huge sums of money.”

Hampered by anemic fund-raising efforts, virtually no name recognition and sporadic media coverage, candidates such as Allen, Democrat Joseph M. Alioto and Republican Jim Trinity are given virtually no chance of winning their party primaries Tuesday.

They have participated in obscure candidate forums, attended student rallies, addressed church gatherings and met with newspaper editors. They have protested bank mergers, federal income taxes and Japanese automobile exports. They’ve compiled detailed position papers and have offered solutions to everything from the budget deficit to the nation’s health care crisis.

But the most recent Los Angeles Times Poll shows Allen with the most support among the three--a meager 5% of likely Republican voters. Alioto registered 3% among likely Democratic voters in the same poll, while Trinity garnered 1% among Republicans.

The picture is equally bleak in terms of fund raising: Allen has collected about $155,000 (including $13,000 of his own money), Trinity about $215,000 (including $200,000 of his own) and Alioto about $160,000 (including $100,000 of his own). By contrast, none of the nine leading candidates for the two Senate seats has collected less than $2 million.

“It is a Catch-22,” said Trinity, 50, a former Glendale dentist running against Allen, Rep. William E. Dannemeyer and Sen. John Seymour for the Republican nomination for the two-year seat. “If you are not written up, you don’t make the polls. If you are not in the polls, you are not going to be written about. You have to have a hell of a lot of perseverance.”

The predicament can lead to moments of desperation. In Trinity’s case, it nearly got him arrested.

Anxious to attract attention to his little-known bid that has emphasized health care reform and cuts in federal spending, the first-time candidate parked three flatbed trucks loaded with phony dollar bills outside the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles to protest the federal deficit.

The stunt blocked traffic and rattled some nerves, but when Trinity refused to remove the trucks, parking enforcement officers ordered that they be towed away--and the police moved in.

“I have never seen in my life more apathy or more indifference to what’s going on,” Trinity bellowed into a hand-held microphone from atop one of the trucks. “I am willing to risk being arrested,” he advised several police officers who approached him with a firetruck ladder. “This is not grandstanding. It comes directly from the heart.”

Trinity escaped arrest by abandoning his post atop the truck, but much to his chagrin, the incident generated little publicity outside his hometown Glendale newspaper. Almost everyone in town was more interested in the announcement that day of Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ successor.

“We got next to zero, like zero plus one,” lamented Marvin Feldman, Trinity’s campaign director. “We were aced out. We had three 40-foot tractor trailers and . . . we blocked the whole street. I have about an hour’s worth on video.”

Sometimes the fickle gods of campaign fortune can be more obliging to a determined candidate. Alioto, a Democrat running for the two-year seat, was the only member of his party who bothered to make a recent trip to Palm Springs for a forum sponsored by the conservative California Peace Officers Assn.

To his good fortune, he was also the only Democrat on hand when a television crew arrived unannounced from the CBS network.

Alioto was prepared for a hostile audience--he even warned members of the group that they might not like everything he had to say--but he was not about to miss an opportunity to be heard. In fact, Alioto delivered a largely friendly address to the peace officers (although he did not shy away from expressing his opposition to the death penalty), his audience of 100 was cordial, and the CBS cameras were rolling throughout.

In an election where television news has virtually ignored the U. S. Senate campaigns, it was no small feat to be filmed by a network. Even if there was no guarantee that the footage would be aired, it provided a small piece of encouragement in a largely discouraging campaign.

A prominent antitrust attorney and the son of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, Alioto has been frustrated by his inability to break away from the pack of so-called minor candidates. Mention his name in the same breath as Trinity or Allen, and his campaign staff bristles. Equally tough for them to take is the media fascination with Sonny Bono, a Republican candidate for the six-year seat, whose celebrity status and often entertaining stump speeches have elevated him to “major candidate” standing.

“I am not a whiner and I don’t mind being the underdog,” Alioto, 48, said in an interview. “But the chance of winning ought not to be a criteria” for coverage.

Alioto has built his campaign around a theme he knows well: that corporate mergers and buy-outs are killing the U. S. economy by reducing competition.

The first-time candidate has written letters to President Bush urging that he block the merger of banking giants Bank of America and Security Pacific, protested the buyout of defense contractor General Dynamics, opposed joint ventures between computer companies IBM and Apple, and joined a demonstration over the closing of a meat-packing plant in the Central Valley.

“Instead of encouraging competition among our major corporations, the last two administrations have encouraged combinations, mergers and the elimination of competition,” Alioto said. “The results of this bankrupt economic policy have been devastating to this country. Jobs have been lost. Prices have increased. Products and services have deteriorated. And whole industries have vanished.”

Alioto’s cause has not been helped by a late start--he entered the race in March, virtually unheard of for serious candidates for a statewide office--and his newcomer status to elective politics.

Untried candidates vying for statewide office are traditionally doomed to failure, unless they already enjoy tremendous name recognition or popularity. Such was the case with actors Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, who won gubernatorial and senatorial races, respectively, in their first campaigns.

Alioto has been running as a “good Democrat,” reluctant to criticize his primary opponents--former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and state Controller Gray Davis, both of whom he describes as friends and political allies.

“I am not running against them,” Alioto said. “I am concentrating 100% on the bankrupt economic policies of the last 12 years . . . and (Feinstein and Davis) are not to blame.”

On the Republican side, Allen has not been so reluctant. In speeches across the state, the 47-year-old professor of government has said his candidacy is designed to re-establish the conservative movement as “the authentic voice” of the Republican Party, a direct attack on Seymour, who favors abortion rights and is perceived by conservative Republicans as too liberal.

It was with that goal in mind that Allen began airing a 30-second television spot that graphically depicts an abortion in progress. Allen, who first ran for the Senate in 1986, said the commercial was intended to “advance public understanding” of the abortion issue.

Allen, appointed by Reagan to the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, has waged a Reagan-style campaign heavy on patriotism, conservatism and attacks on Washington bureaucracy and waste. He has preached about personal responsibility, self-government and mainstream American values, often in the context of the Los Angeles riots.

“We have for too long been building this pattern in our politics, a pattern of dividing our citizens into groups, by race, by gender, by ethnicity and by according them no more respect than comes with a check from Washington,” Allen said at one Republican gathering, explaining his opposition to a bill that would provide federal aid to riot-torn areas.

“And I would like to see an end to that. It seems to me if we are to restore self-government, we are going to have to begin by restoring a sense of responsibility.”

As the only black in either Senate race, Allen said he believes his continued poor showing in the polls may be attributed to a temporary backlash among some voters to the riots. But he described his candidacy as an insurgency that is not deterred by such setbacks, and he frequently points to a statewide California Poll that showed him faring the best among the Republican candidates against Feinstein--but still losing.

In 1986, Allen dropped out of the Senate race and endorsed fellow conservative Republican Bruce Herschensohn. This time around, some conservatives--particularly those aligned with Dannemeyer--have complained that Allen’s candidacy will guarantee victory for Seymour by splitting the conservative vote. Allen dismisses such speculation.

“There is no doubt in my mind that there is no other chance for a conservative victory in this election than Bill Allen,” he said.

Seemingly united by their underdog status, the so-called minor candidates still go to great lengths to distance themselves from one another. Trinity complained bitterly when he was recently excluded from a debate in San Diego of Republican candidates, but Allen--who also has struggled to be included in some forums--was quick to dismiss his rival’s protests.

“I think one has to earn a place at the forum,” Allen said. “It is not enough to simply have spent one’s own money running around the state campaigning.”

Trinity, rushing to another campaign appearance after speaking to a gathering of Republican women in San Marino, said he does not let such criticism--even from fellow “nobodies,” as he described them--get him down. Just maybe, he said with a big smile, some luck will come his way.

“There are a lot of Catholics out there,” he said. “With a name like Trinity, they’ll say: ‘Son of a gun, if I don’t vote for that guy, what kind of penance am I going to get?’ ”

With that, he urged all Catholics to the polls Tuesday and was on his way.