Garden Grove Baptist minister Wiley Drake summed up the only hope for congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist earlier this week as he delivered grace before a fundraising crowd of 120 people at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach.
"Pray that they might have the courage to vote for the man, not vote for the party," intoned Drake, speaking of voters in the 48th Congressional District, where Gilchrist has been courting Republicans and Democrats in a Dec. 6 special election.
Gilchrist is running a longshot race as the American Independent Party nominee for the coastal Orange County seat formerly held by Christopher Cox of Newport Beach. In July, Cox was approved as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project, a volunteer group that patrols the border with Mexico, is reaching out to voters across party lines with his anti-illegal immigration message.
In stressing his activism, he hopes major-party voters will choose him over state Sen. John Campbell (R-Irvine) and Democrat Steve Young. Five candidates are on next month's special-election ballot. They represent each party's top vote-getter in an Oct. 4 primary with 19 candidates.
Campbell got 45.5% of the vote, short of the majority vote he needed to win outright. Gilchrist of the American Independent Party finished third with 14.8%; Democrat Young finished fourth with 8.7%; the Green Party's Bea Tiritilli finished ninth with 0.9% and Libertarian Bruce Cohen finished 10th with 0.8%.
Second place went to former Assemblywoman Marilyn C. Brewer of Newport Beach, a Republican.
The coastal district, which runs from Newport Beach south to Dana Point and includes Irvine and Tustin, is considered one of the most predictably Republican districts in the nation.
On Dec. 6, far more GOP voters will stay with Campbell than switch to Gilchrist, predicted Matt Cunningham, a Republican political consultant from Orange who is unaffiliated with the race.
"John Campbell took a lot of hits in the primary and he ended up with almost 50%," Cunningham said. And, he added, Gilchrist may be hurt by new criticism.
He was referring to Gilchrist's acknowledgment that he voted for Green Party candidate Peter Camejo in the 2003 gubernatorial recall election. Campbell has also highlighted in a brochure some quotes from Gilchrist calling President Bush clueless and advocating taxing "the ultra-rich more."
