Future Is on the Line for O.C. Voters Tuesday : Election: Hopes and fears resonate in the thoughts of citizens pondering who can best revive the economy.

In living rooms in Newport Beach and on factory floors in Anaheim, there is gloom. Jobs have gone, plants have closed, it takes forever to sell a house. The once unthinkable now seems possible--a Democratic winner in presidential balloting in Orange County.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Orange County was incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1936. A little over 100,000 people lived here then; it was a land of farms and orchards, street cars to the shore, movie stars summering in Laguna and Newport Beach.

This year more than 2.4 million people live in the county, and the boom years are over. It seems to be time to vote your pocketbook and that’s bad news for a Republican President in a year of recession.

Little more than a week ago, Democrat Bill Clinton drew 20,000 to a rally in Costa Mesa--a massive turnout by Orange County party standards.

Clinton appeals to people like Yvonne Rozycki of Huntington Beach, who voted for Bush four years ago but was jolted when her brother lost his job and had to move in with her. Clinton is a magnet for Refugio Mejia of Santa Ana, who wants the nation to remember it was built on the sweat of immigrants.

President Bush still has his followers, of course. The Times Orange County Poll found him virtually deadlocked with Clinton last weekend.

The close race has drawn national attention to Orange County, which Republicans have always counted on to provide enough of a cushion to carry California, like Bush’s 300,000-vote margin of 1988.

Bush benefits from Nam and Van Tran’s memory of staunch Republican anti-communism. And the Republican emphasis on family values means more for Lavern Huff of Dana Point than her sons’ unemployment.

This year’s wild card has been businessman Ross Perot, running a close third in The Times Poll and a man with a message for Loretta Thoe of Anaheim and Dan Lefler in Dana Point. They like his tough talk, his warning that the deficit must be cut.

Voters may have different choices for President, but their concerns are clear. With the threat of the Soviet Union vanished, the eyes of the electorate have turned homeward, and there’s worry all around.

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Rozycki, a Bush Democrat, is coming home.

“George Bush has lost touch with the people and he definitely doesn’t have the answer,” says the 34-year-old accountant from Huntington Beach. Believing change is necessary, she’s voting for Clinton.

Rozycki voted for Bush four years ago, despite her Democratic Party membership. For one thing, she didn’t like Michael Dukakis. For another, she felt someone like Bush would be more able to deal with the political changes in Eastern Europe. Also, times were good: She had a well-paying job and had finally achieved her dream of buying a home.

But after the 1988 election, Rozycki saw her bills increasing and her income not keeping up. It’s been four years since she had a vacation. Still, she thought that “everything will get better” before too long.

Then last July her brother lost his job as a pilot with Northwest Airlines, and he and his wife moved into Rozycki’s two-bedroom condominium. She says that’s when she realized “just how bad everything really was, and that it will not get better for a long, long time.”

“At that moment, it finally hit me, the irony of it all,” Rozycki said one evening, sitting in her kitchen. “There he was in what is supposed to be the greatest nation. He has a college degree and 10 years of experience working as a fighter pilot in the Air Force and in the end, he couldn’t get a job anywhere. He had to join the unemployment line just like so many other people in this country.”

Last month he got a job flying with an airline in the Netherlands, but even that just underlined the irony, Rozycki said. “He had to move out of this country to get a comparable job. There just doesn’t seem to be much here anymore.”

Rozycki does give Bush credit for “the great job that he did abroad,” but said she feels he has neglected domestic problems.

“The unemployment lines are growing, welfare recipients are growing, crime is going up and the country’s debt is out of control,” she said, ticking off the problems in a voice tinged with frustration. “Everyone that I talk to is talking about their problems. People just don’t have as much hope for better lives.

“We were raised believing in the American Dream, that if we go to college and work hard, then we’d have good jobs and a comfortable life,” she said. “With all the problems that this country is going through, I just don’t think the dream exists for people anymore.”

Rozycki said her financial cutbacks have not been severe. To cover the mortgage and other bills, she has had “to rent videos instead of going to movies, eat at home instead of restaurants, think about what it is that I need to buy and then go look for discounts.”

“I think I’ve achieved my basic goals and that’s to have a steady job and own a home,” she said. “Of course, now I have to look at the unemployment and jobless figures I’m always hearing about, and remember what happened to my own brother and know that my job is never guaranteed.”

DAN LEFLER

‘I think Perot is about as radical as you can get and still stay somewhat rational.’

Dana Point musician Dan Lefler doesn’t like the Republican Party’s position on abortion or the Democratic Party’s views on social welfare. Luckily for him, this year there’s Ross Perot.

An outspoken man, Lefler, 32, said the two most important issues in this election are abortion and the deficit. And if someone doesn’t act soon on both issues, he said, his 4-year-old daughter, Nicole, will suffer one day.

Lefler said he is “disillusioned” with Republican leaders because they have “leaned too far to the right . . . specifically, with the abortion question.”

The Republican Party, Lefler said, has allowed “zealots to dictate its platform” and oppose a woman’s opportunity to have an abortion.

“Perot has already said a woman should have the rights to make decisions concerning her body, and that’s something that should not have even be questioned in the first place,” said Lefler, a divorcee who shares custody of his daughter with his ex-wife.

“I am a man and so that issue will never affect me. But, my daughter, like all women, should be able to live her own life and not have anyone who professes to be leader of this country tell her what to do.”

Lefler also believes that once a government succeeds in banning a woman’s right to get abortions, “it will also attempt to control our lives and tell us, everybody, what we can do and cannot do.” He says performing artists like himself are likely to have their work censored in that case.

Lefler is as passionate about the deficit, a looming problem which he said will dictate his and Nicole’s standard of living.

“What I find admirable about Perot is that he zeroed in on the deficit while the other two wouldn’t go anywhere near it,” Lefler said. “Perot tells it like it is, and even as the sheer size of the national debt scares me, what scares me more is that . . . the creditors one day are going to come knocking and I, and later my daughter, are the ones who will be forced to pay this huge debt.”

Something has to be done about that now, Lefler said, or “in four or five years, interest rates from the deficit alone will completely bring the economy down.”

Lefler believes that Perot has the experience to grapple with the deficit because of his success in running a multibillion-dollar business.

“I think that it’s possible to get this country back on the right tracks if we make a radical change in leadership, and I think Perot is about as radical as you can get and still stay somewhat rational,” Lefler said. “If we stay on the same course, this country will only get worse. I don’t want that. I want to make sure that my daughter will have as good a life as I have or better.

“And, that will not be possible if you take choices away from her or if you force her to pay a debt that existed long before she was born.”

REFUGIO MEJIA

‘A Democratic President will remember that this country was built on immigrant workers. He will work on behalf of working people and not businesses.’

How important is this year’s election to Refugio Mejia? Important enough to get him to become a citizen, after 26 years in the country, so he can vote in the presidential election--for Bill Clinton.

Mejia, 46, has lived in Santa Ana for 20 years. He struggles with English, refers to the “Democracy” party when he means Democrats, but uses an interpreter only as a last resort. And he knows what he wants.

Republicans “do not care for me and people like me, who work hard but cannot get work. They only care about what happens in other countries. They don’t care about the working people here in this country.”

Until 1985, things weren’t too bad for Mejia. After emigrating from Mexico, he picked strawberries, lemons and apricots, “carrying big, heavy bags” of fruit in the fields. His hands are baked dark by the days in the sun, gnarled from the labor. He worked so that “things can . . . be better, for me and for my children.”

He switched jobs and found work as a painter for a Garden Grove boat manufacturer, making $14.85 an hour, a grand enough wage to let him buy his first television set, he recalled. But in 1985 he was laid off, and he had to scramble for odd jobs like gardening and house painting. He thinks that economic conditions “have been bad for a long time under Reagan and under Bush.”

These days Mejia works as an activity coordinator with Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Santa Ana-based group that provides legal support to Latino immigrants. He makes $10 an hour, which doesn’t leave much after paying the $1,200 monthly rent and buying food for himself, his wife and their four children.

Mejia said one reason for not trying to become a citizen earlier was fear he might fail the test. “But this year, when I think the Democracy party might win, I decided to try so I can vote.”

Besides, “not too many of us (Latinos) have this chance” to vote, “and I do not want to waste my chance.” His hope? “Maybe if a Democratic is President, maybe there will be good times. . . . Maybe this small dream I have will come true.”

Furthermore, he is optimistic that “a Democratic President will remember that this country was built on immigrant workers. A Democratic President will protect the jobs at home and make more jobs. He will work on behalf of working people and not businesses.”

Mejia had thought that after a number of years in America, “I can send the second generation to college so they can get good jobs.”

So far, none of his older children have entered college, opting instead to stay home or work odd jobs to help support the family. He has “high hopes that things will be better for” his 13-year-old son.

“If Clinton is President, maybe there will be more jobs with higher pay for my children. . . . (Maybe) then, we can send the youngest to college.”

Mejia also has his eye on a house in Santa Ana that’s for sale for $120,000. If he can buy it, it will symbolize an achievement in America.

“For 26 years, I have worked very hard for my family, but my children do not have much more than what I have,” he said. “I hope my vote will help. It’s a step and more steps are needed . . . one after the other, for life to be better.”

NAM AND VAN TRAN

‘It’s not that I don’t like Clinton. It’s just that I have more to lose if Clinton is elected.’

The Communists drove Nam and Van Tran from South Vietnam, their homeland. They’ve been unemployed from time to time in their adopted country, America. Yet they’ve managed to claw their way up to the middle class, and they’re not about to risk what has taken them so much struggle to win.

Because of the Republican Party’s anti-communism, and despite the economy, the Trans plan to vote for Bush.

The Trans met as refugees on Guam after South Vietnam fell in 1975. They married in France in 1977 and moved to California the next year. Both are 37, living in a comfortable three-bedroom house in Santa Ana with a $600 monthly mortgage. They send their 12-year-old daughter to Catholic school and bring in $50,000 a year.

“It’s not that I don’t like Clinton,” Nam Tran said. “It’s just that I have more to lose if Clinton is elected.”

Nam Tran is a machinist with an aerospace company that has laid him off twice in the past two years because of federal defense budget cuts. He believes that Clinton will cut defense spending more deeply if he’s elected, and that his job would be one of the first to go.

“Believe me, because I know the consequences of a poor economy, I now only count on my job on a week-by-week basis,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I get ready to leave on Friday and the boss doesn’t call me in, that’s when I know I can breathe easier and that I’m safe next week.”

Like her husband, Van Tran has been out of work, though not for long. She lost her job as an assembler at an electronics company last December when the business moved to Kansas. But she was hired by another company within a month.

During their stretches of unemployment, the couple lived on savings built up over the years.

Nam and Van Tran admitted that because of their savings, the recession hasn’t hurt them as much as it has some other families. But they have cut back on the little extras they took for granted four years ago.

The yearly vacations to visit relatives in Seattle or Canada have gone by the boards, as have the weekend jaunts to Las Vegas. The weekends dancing the night away with friends are a thing of the past too. “At $60 to $70 a night for both of us, I guess I shouldn’t miss the dance clubs too much,” Van Tran said wistfully.

But she says the United States isn’t the only country suffering hard times, and doesn’t think things will improve soon, no matter who occupies the White House. And from her perspective, Bush’s foreign policy experience is a major plus.

“We’re being too harsh in blaming these problems on a man who has succeeded in making us feel safer in the world. I want to give him a chance to finish what he said he would do--make this a wealthier country. But, I don’t think that’s going to happen tomorrow so I’ll just vote and hope that things will get better.”

The Trans have an added reason to hope things will improve. Two months ago Van gave birth to a second daughter, Michelle.

LAVERN HUFF

‘There’s a lot about Bush I like; Desert Storm just showed that there’s a real strong side to that man. I think he has what it takes to turn this country around.’

Lavern Huff has seen the recession from both sides now. At home, her three sons, ages 22 to 27, moved back into her two-bedroom Dana Point townhouse after being unable to find steady jobs.

At work, more people are bouncing checks, more are shoplifting and fewer are splurging.

Her choice for the next President? George Bush.

“You bet there’s a recession,” said Huff, standing behind a cash register at the San Juan Capistrano discount clothing outlet she manages.

“And you bet everyone--me, you, my family, those shoppers--is suffering. There’s definitely lots of problems going on in this country that needs fixing.”

Huff switched her registration from Democrat to Republican years ago. She likes Bush’s tough actions during the Gulf War. She admires his foreign policy expertise. She believes that he will make good on his promise to remedy the ills at home. She thinks he’s making inroads into the war on drugs. And she’s especially pleased that he touched upon family values at the start of his campaign.

Huff defines family values as parents teaching their children right and wrong, and spending time talking with and listening to the kids. Huff said issues such as homosexuality, abortion, single-parent families--which some have included under the “family values” umbrella--are not that important.

Huff has some regrets of her own about the way she raised her sons: None of them went to college and she says two “got involved in drugs” for a while.

“Most of the parents today are wrong--we gave our kids too much, too soon, without taking time out to listen to them and make them listen to us,” Huff said. “We are so used to getting them up and throwing them out so we can go on with our lives. Parents today need to take the time out and learn about and communicate with our children.”

“The government needs to get involved and finance programs that can teach parents and children on how to deal with different problems like drugs and alcohol, and how to not make life miserable for each other.”

The Republican stress on family at the Houston convention was especially well-timed for Huff. The convention was in August; in July, her three sons, who had been living on their own, moved back home after losing their jobs.

“They’re jacks-of-all-trades, looking for jobs like painting and tire-mounting, and those jobs just are not out there,” she said. “So, since they’ve been home, we’re learning to talk more, discuss more, and my husband and I are learning to accept our children the way they are and support them.”

Huff said she and her husband, an oil refinery supervisor, are “comfortable” on their $50,000 annual income, although “we’re definitely worse off this year than we’ve ever been because our sons moved in with us and our bills are now higher.

“There’s a lot about Bush I like; Desert Storm just showed that there’s a real strong side to that man,” she said. “If he can be a leader in a situation like that, then I think he has what it takes to turn this country around.”

LORETTA THOE

‘Perot seems like a good businessman who can get things done. He’s different from the other two. He’s what we need now.’

Loretta Thoe grew up in a quiet, Republican, middle-class home in Anaheim. For years, she expected her life to be much like her mother’s.

Then came a rocky marriage at age 16 to a truck driver who she said drank too much, the birth of three children and a difficult marital breakup that forced her to temporarily sleep in her car and leave two of her children with the in-laws.

Thoe, now 30, still lives in Anaheim, but in a far different environment.

She lives with her kids in a small, tidy apartment in a poor, often violent neighborhood off La Palma Avenue where the palm trees are sprayed with graffiti and gunfire sometimes rings out at night. A welfare recipient, Thoe is close to earning her high school diploma and hopes to go on to college.

Through it all, she has remained committed to the principle that if she works hard enough, her tomorrow will be better than her today.

She is not as optimistic about the country’s future, which is why this politically conservative woman will probably back Ross Perot on Tuesday.

“I think they are going to have a hard time out there,” Thoe said of her children, ages 13, 12 and 6. “Our economy, the ozone layer and the whole Earth--I hope it all stays together long enough so that my children have a future.”

Her kids are a major factor in her political views these days as she tries to help them stay interested in school and make the right choices. In her eyes, this election is about deciding what kind of world her children will inherit.

Thoe remains a registered Republican and voted for Bush in 1988. And while she praised the President’s handling of foreign affairs, she is intrigued by Perot’s calls to erase the deficit and bequeath a better society to the next generation.

“He seems like a good businessman who can get things done. He’s different from the other two,” she said. “He’s what we need now.”

Some of Perot’s ideas--such as his proposed 50-cent gas tax--don’t sit well with Thoe. But his down-to-earth manner and focus on transforming the country appeal to her.

One of the most pressing issues facing America is improving educational opportunities, she said. It’s a subject Thoe knows something about. Both she and her children are studying math, and they often help each other with homework. She sees schooling as the ticket to better lives for both herself and her kids.

“Education is very important to me,” she said. “I don’t want any more decreases in the salaries of teachers. Education is like the military: It’s a must for our country.”

Another major issue is immigration. The government, Thoe said, should try harder to slow the tide of illegal immigration into California, which she thinks is a drain on the economy. “We’ve got to help the people who are in this country now,” she said.

Also appealing about Perot is his tough stance on controlling drugs and crime. Living in a rough neighborhood, Thoe said she sees the problems drug-dealing causes and recognizes something drastic must be done.

“I could run in my street and play when I was young,” she said. “Here, I don’t let my kids off the sidewalk unless I watch them.”

ORANGE COUNTY AND THE PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

When Americans select the next President on Tuesday, the results in Orange County may make history, for it has been 56 years since a Democrat has won here. Today, The Times presents a special look at Orange County’s presidential balloting trend.

* Election EKG: Charting how the county voted over the past 14 presidential elections.

* Most Republican: The top five most Republican and most Democratic cities.

* Counting votes: How ballots go from 1,800 polling places to computers in Sacramento.

Sunday Briefing, B3