Thread: Election wakes up! Gilchrist Campaign final push!

Following October's primary, candidacies were mostly dormant. Now, the final push to the Dec. 6 poll begins.
By Alicia Robinson, Daily Pilot

After a brief period of hibernation -- from about the Oct. 4 primary until last week -- candidates for the 48th Congressional District seat are coming out of their caves.

The question is whether they can wake anyone else in time for the Dec. 6 general election.

The U.S. House seat was left open when Rep. Chris Cox, who held it since 1988, became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in August.

Seventeen candidates entered an Oct. 4 special primary, and the five candidates who survived are Republican state Sen. John Campbell, Libertarian Bruce Cohen, American Independent Party candidate Jim Gilchrist, Green Party candidate Béa Tiritilli and Democrat Steve Young.

Just a month or so ago, papers including the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune were writing about the race. Recently, coverage has been scant, in part because people were distracted by the Nov. 8 poll.

And fast approaching is the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas slump, which UC Irvine political scientist Mark Petracca called "the time in which the American public goes to sleep."

But candidates have been stepping up their activity -- Young planned to attend a demonstration today at Rep. Dana Rohrabacher's Huntington Beach office, and Gilchrist announced he'll be fundraising with Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo on Monday.

Political observers expect media coverage of the House race to pick up, both in and out of California. For one thing, pretty much every other political contest is over.

"I think all the media tea leaf readers were focused on New Jersey and Virginia," where Democrats won governor's races last week, said Matthew Felling, media director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C.

But with control of the House hinging on fewer than 20 votes, the media will start watching Orange County's race, he said.

"The news networks are political junkies, and the large state newspapers will give it some attention as well," Felling said.

Much of what's been written about the race has focused on Gilchrist's candidacy as a focus of the debate over how to address illegal immigration, and that will probably continue.

Since illegal immigration became the latest political football, the media has been all over it, said William Gheen, president of North Carolina-based group Americans for Legal Immigration. The group has promoted Gilchrist's candidacy.

"The national media tried to ignore the Minuteman Project until the very end, and then April 1 when it started, they jumped on board," he said.

But with many people in the 48th Congressional District believing Campbell will take the seat, a few salvos of news stories and punditry aren't likely to get much of a response from voters.

"People are pretty burned out," UC Irvine political scientist Louis DeSipio said. "For many people, the winner is a foregone conclusion."

He predicted low voter turnout consisting almost entirely of absentee ballots, and Petracca agreed, predicting Dec. 6 turnout at 15% or less.

Of course, DeSipio said, members of Congress don't need mandates, so how few votes it takes to elect the winner doesn't matter.

So when voters start getting mailers from the candidates who want to represent them in Congress, they may not even stifle their yawns.

Unless one of the candidates can frame the election as a crucial one, Felling said, "The district will just sleepwalk itself through Dec. 6."

DISTRICT VOTERS

On Tuesday the Orange County Registrar of Voters began mailing absentee ballots for the Dec. 6 Congressional special election. Here are the latest voter registration figures for the 48th Congressional District, which includes Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Irvine and all or part of nine other Orange County cities.

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