Perot Supporters Say Movement Is Just Beginning : Politics: The billionaire’s local backers are buoyed by his 27% share of the county’s vote. They look toward 1996.

To Ross Perot’s true believers, Tuesday’s election was a beginning not an end.

In Thousand Oaks, they’ve already ordered their “Perot 96” T-shirts. In Port Hueneme on Thursday night, they began a registration drive to qualify Perot’s United We Stand, America as an official political party.

And, in Oxnard, they’re deciding how to make President-elect Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress pay a political price if they don’t cut the nation’s budget deficit by 1994.

Throughout Ventura County, where Perot got 27% of the presidential vote Tuesday, campaign activists are saying America hasn’t seen anything yet from the maverick Texas businessman and the grass-roots campaign he inspired.

“We are a 20th-Century revolution, and we definitely are not going to go away,” Karrol Maughmer, west county Perot coordinator, said Thursday.

Rodney Billman, a Perot leader in Thousand Oaks, said his office had polled 200 campaign volunteers since Perot’s loss Tuesday night.

“Just one said he wasn’t interested in continuing,” Billman said. “As Ross said in his speech at the end, we’re just beginning.”

The strong local interest in transforming Perot’s movement into a watchdog organization, or a separate political party, reflects discussions among his followers on the state and national levels.

While many of Perot’s 35 campaign offices in California have already closed--including the two in Ventura County--Perot’s statewide campaign director, Bob Hayden, said the closures are only temporary.

“The phone is ringing off the hook with new volunteers,” said Hayden, a civil engineer from Ventura. “And once we get our permanent movement started, I look for the local chapters to spring back up.”

Several Perot activists said their interests are no longer solely on national issues, and they expect United We Stand to endorse candidates, or run its own, in races from local school boards to federal offices.

But a question remains about the staying power of Perot and his movement, which by drawing 19 million votes established the Dallas billionaire as the most successful independent candidate in recent U. S. history.

What happens if Perot elects not to lead his movement, either as a pre-presidential campaign or as a watchdog organization?

“Good question,” Hayden said. “I think the movement would still be alive and could be a major political party that runs its own state and national candidates in 1996.”

Perot was the catalyst for voter discontent this year, Hayden said, but even without him, millions who voted for Perot would still need an outlet other than politics as usual.

Hayden said, however, that the strength of Perot-led populism might partly depend on how well “the two major parties invigorate themselves with platforms the American people can identify with.”

Hayden himself--one of only two paid workers in Perot’s California campaign--will return to his engineer’s job in Ventura next week. And just how Perot’s movement will rebuild itself is uncertain.

Perot’s state steering committee will take up the reorganization this weekend in Los Angeles. And in Dallas, Perot strategists met Thursday on the same issue.

“Are we going to keep this thing going?” Orson Swindle, executive director of United We Stand, asked Wednesday. “In all candor, there’s no way we can stop it.”

In fact, local Perot chapters, which sprouted as semiautonomous and self-funded during the campaign, are moving ahead even as they wait for direction from Dallas.

A Port Hueneme group met Thursday night to discuss the future and to re-register as voters in a fledgling United We Stand movement, volunteer Alex Pegel said.

If about 79,000 state voters register in the movement by January, 1994, it will become an official political party. And Pegel said he and others believe that they can get that many registered Perot voters in Ventura and Los Angeles counties alone.

“I don’t know what the (larger) organization does. Who cares,” said Pegel, a television writer. “We’ll sort that out later. We’re just going to get ourselves together again. We’re not going away.”

Maughmer, an Oxnard real estate agent, and Billman, a retired building contractor, said many Ventura County volunteers are anxious to continue in politics now that it seems more receptive to them.

Both said they expect local Perot chapters to meet monthly, circulate local newsletters and gather information so members will know the voting records of members of Congress and state and local politicians.

The typical Perot volunteer had never worked in a campaign before, Billman said, but they are not eager to leave now that they’ve found a vehicle for change.

Jerry and Barbara Myers, real estate brokers who retired in Oxnard and have supported Perot since last spring, said they intend to stay with the movement.

“I was never involved in politics, not in the slightest,” Barbara Myers said. “But there I was standing on a street corner and asking people to vote for Ross Perot.

“He inspired us,” she said, “to do things we had never done before.”