Mike Stoker, Republican contender for the 35th Assembly District seat, thinks a big part of the problem in Sacramento is the governor of his own party. “Gray Davis was a better governor for California than Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “The governor hasn’t stood up to the special interests holding the government hostage.”

The candid comment by Stoker, a 53-year-old former county supervisor, reflects a counterintuitive streak in the candidate, which may help explain his defiance of the conventional wisdom that a Republican can’t win the Democrat-dominated 35th district. In an interview the day after he declared his candidacy last week, Stoker confidently insisted his low-tax, less-government, pro-business, “100 percent economic agenda” will hold strong crossover appeal for independents and moderate Democrats in the district.

“I’m a Ventura County kid,” said the long-ago graduate of Camarillo High School and 25-year veteran of local, state, and national political wars. “I know Ventura County Democrats. They’re Blue Dog Democrats, who think more like me than like southern Santa Barbara County Democrats.”

A year out from the 2010 primary elections, Stoker’s combination of experience, energy, and statewide political connections make him a slam dunk pick to win the Republican nomination for the seat. At that point, however, when he’s expected to face off against the winner of the Susan Jordan-Das Williams Democratic primary, the partisan arithmetic gets very challenging for him.

The district—which includes the Santa Ynez Valley and the South Coast in Santa Barbara County, and Ventura, El Rio, and Oxnard in Ventura County—has been held by a Democrat since the map for it was drawn in the reapportionment of 2000, first by Hannah-Beth Jackson and, for the last six years, by the termed-out Pedro Nava. Voter registration has moved steadily away from Republicans in recent years, and now favors Democrats 48-28 percent, according to a report issued by the Secretary of State last month.

But Stoker’s betting on a stars-are-aligned political calculus to beat the odds and pull off an upset in 2010. For starters, there is a contested primary on the other side, which will require both Jordan and Williams to spend money and other resources to get to the general election, an obstacle course Stoker likely will be spared.

Because 2010 is not a presidential election year, when voter turnout peaks, he believes he’ll also benefit from low vote totals in the liberal districts around Isla Vista and UCSB, giving the overall electorate a more centrist cast. Finally, he points to 2004, the last contested election race for an open seat in the 35th district, when Republican Bob Pohl made a competitive run, eventually losing 52.8-47.2 percent to Nava. In that race, Pohl’s final percentage was more than 15 points higher than GOP registration that year, while Nava ran about eight points ahead of his party on the Democratic side; from Stoker’s perspective, this means that Pohl captured about twice as many independent/decline-to-state voters as his rival.

“Voters know something isn’t working up there, and the answer isn’t just more taxes.” — Mike Stoker

The problem for the Republican, however, is that since the 2004 race, the gap in partisan registration has accelerated even more, with the GOP’s registration level falling further behind the Democrats’ in just six years. But Stoker believes that the results of the May 19 special election, in which voters overwhelmingly defeated five state budget ballot initiatives sponsored by Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Democratic leadership of the Legislature, clearly signal a political sea change. Voters are “really tired of balancing budgets with tax increases and revenue shell games,” he said, and looking for realignment on the order of the early 1990s, when Republicans took control of the Congress and, briefly, the Assembly. Armed with this political prognosis, Stoker will try to position himself as the agent of change, portraying either Jordan or Williams as the status quo candidate of Democratic legislative leaders.

“Voters know something isn’t working up there, and the answer isn’t just more taxes,” he said. “I can appeal to them on that a lot more than Das or Susan, unless they get a makeover.”

For starters, Stoker said, there must be major layoffs of government employees—in the ballpark of 20 percent of the workforce—to bring spending in line with revenues. Noting substantial growth in the budget and the number of state workers under Schwarzenegger, he said he would fight to break the power of public employee unions in Sacramento.

“Government has to go through a cleansing, in a similar way as corporations did,” he said. “Government shouldn’t be here to be an employment agency. … Public employee unions have [Sacramento] held hostage and the government hasn’t stood up to them.”

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