Upstart GOP Crew Is Life of the Party

A group of Orange County executives who came together in January to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party has sunk roots for the Nov. 7 election, smashing fund-raising records and helping register more local GOP voters than Democrats for the first time in eight years.

In the past six weeks, members of the New Majority Committee co-hosted two million-dollar fund-raisers, collecting a staggering $2.6 million for the state party. The money is earmarked to promote presidential candidate George W. Bush and buoy the chances of Republican hopefuls across the ticket.

The group also spent $50,000 to co-sponsor a drive that registered 27,000 county Republican voters and contributed $300,000 in recent months to boost the chances of moderate GOP candidates in four state Assembly and three state Senate races.

No other Republican group in California has come close to delivering that kind of ammunition for Nov. 7.

“I don’t think Orange County has seen anything like it,” said Michael Capaldi, president of the Lincoln Club of Orange County, an established national fund-raising group that co-sponsored the voter registration drive.

“A lot of credit goes to them,” Capaldi said. “There’s plenty of room for people who want to be actively supporting Republicans, moderate or otherwise.”

Jon Fleischman, the conservative executive director of the state GOP, agreed. “They’ve stepped up to the plate.”

In the process, the New Majority has emerged as a team player--after first drawing attention for criticizing the coaches. Members of the group made headlines in January when they announced they had formed as an alternative to entrenched party leaders whom they dismissed as intolerant and obsessed with hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control. New Majority leaders said the party was prone to endorsing like-minded candidates, turning off voters in the process.

The past 10 months have been a learning experience, said Thomas Tucker, the group’s chairman and the head of JenStar Capital in Newport Beach.

“One thing we learned was that we need to look at this as an ongoing effort,” Tucker said. “We wanted to make sure that for our investment, we were getting a return. We needed to form coalitions with people we could work with.”

The group’s financial pull didn’t materialize overnight. The New Majority joined with veteran, business-minded Republican donors such as George Argyros and Donald Bren, who shared the goal of broadening the party’s appeal. New contributors from Orange County’s technology community were attracted by the group’s pledge to focus less on divisive social issues and more on economic freedom, smaller government and individual liberty.

“There were people in this community who have strong but moderate, strong but reasonable views on [issues], but they had nowhere to turn,” said Mark C. Johnson, the group’s treasurer and president of Chapin Medical Co. in Corona. “They had basically abdicated their involvement in politics for a generation.”

The group now has 100 members, many of them drawn by the same basic reason that attracted someone like Elizabeth Tierney: “What made the difference was that I was invited,” said Tierney, now an executive committee member.

“I wanted for people who say they are Republicans to have a place to be Republicans in this county,” she said.

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Another factor contributed to the synergy: the promising presidential campaign of Bush, whose folksy manner drew comparisons to party icon Ronald Reagan. Recent polls showing Bush within striking distance of Vice President Al Gore in California rallied donors to pump $16 million into the state in the final two weeks for television advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts.

The election is doubly critical on the state level for the GOP. Democrats are within four votes in the Assembly and three votes in the Senate of securing a veto-proof legislative majority, meaning Gov. Gray Davis would have the potential to blast through the worries and concerns of Republican lawmakers.

Chris St. Hilaire, the consultant for the group’s political action committee, wouldn’t reveal plans for additional spending in the campaign’s final days, saying, “Options always exist.”

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Those willing to criticize the group publicly these days are hard to find. Some longtime party activists, who said they are more attuned to day-to-day volunteers than well-heeled donors, suggested that the group coalesced around the prospects of Bush more than anything else, even the notion of shaking up county’s GOP leadership. If Bush loses the election, “it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens to them,” one Republican activist said.

Tucker and Johnson said the group isn’t going away after Nov. 7. One measure of success they hope to duplicate with the Lincoln Club next year is the countywide voter-registration drive they began in June. The 27,098 new registrations logged by the groups, combined with 52,000 new GOP voters since the March primary, compares with 40,000 new Democrats.

Though Republicans hold on to just under 50% of all county voters--a number that has dropped since 1990--there are still about 230,000 more Republicans than Democrats in Orange County. Statewide, Republicans have slipped to less than a third of all voters.

“Republicans really need to come together,” Capaldi said. “This is good proof that it can happen. Our goal is to keep this up year in, year out to rebuild the Republican presence in Orange County.”