On Election’s Eve, a Final Day of Frenzy

California’s special election battle, the costliest campaign in the state’s long history of do-it-yourself democracy, roared to a close Monday with a freewheeling day of north-to-south appearances by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his political foes.

Stumping from Chico to Del Mar, the governor borrowed a line from his Hollywood days. “Tomorrow is judgment day,” he told senior citizens at a Del Webb retirement community in Roseville, outside Sacramento. “Tomorrow we are going to make a decision: Does the state move forward or does it move backward?”

Labor leaders, who have been at the fore of opposition to Schwarzenegger and his political agenda throughout the year, continued their attacks on the governor for calling the vote.

“This election was absolutely unnecessary,” Martin Ludlow, leader of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, told reporters at a labor rally in Burbank. “There isn’t a single thing on this ballot that actually moves the state of California forward.”

Polls will be open today from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Eight statewide measures are on the ballot, along with a smattering of local contests. Voters in San Diego will choose a new mayor. San Franciscans will consider a gun ban. Residents in the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote on Measure Y, a $4-billion school construction bond issue, and L.A. residents in two council districts will decide their representatives.

Voters will be trudging a well-worn path to the polls. The election marks the sixth statewide vote in just over 3 1/2 years; it was barely two years ago that Californians ousted Democrat Gray Davis and replaced him with Schwarzenegger in the movie star’s first run for public office.

The governor called today’s election in June, after he and Democrats in the Legislature failed to agree on the expansive agenda Schwarzenegger had outlined in January during his State of the State address. Though polls showed that voters never warmed to the special election, Schwarzenegger insisted that it was necessary to take his case to the people, in the manner envisioned by Hiram W. Johnson, the father of the state’s initiative system.

Three of the measures that voters will decide were promoted early on by Schwarzenegger as part of his “year of reform” agenda. Those initiatives -- Propositions 74, 76 and 77 -- would make it more difficult for teachers to obtain job tenure, change the budget system to give the governor more say over spending and give a panel of retired judges the right to decide state political boundaries, a job now done by lawmakers.

A fourth measure that Schwarzenegger has embraced -- Proposition 75 -- would require public employee unions to obtain annual permission from members before using their dues for political purposes.

The ballot package, Schwarzenegger said Monday, was needed to shake up an ossified political establishment in Sacramento.

“Here is California, the fifth largest economy in the world, that almost goes bankrupt because we have a failing system,” Schwarzenegger told supporters at a diner in Chico. “It is a system that makes Sacramento spend, spend, spend, and borrow, borrow, borrow, and then in the end, they want to raise your taxes.”

If Schwarzenegger’s intent was to summon the spirit of Johnson, however, the early 20th century reformer and scourge of moneyed interests might not recognize what he had wrought.

When all the election bills are toted up, campaign spending this year will top $250 million -- it the most expensive initiative campaign in California history.

Much of the spending has come from the pharmaceutical industry, which sponsored a measure, Proposition 78, to create a voluntary drug-discount plan. A rival measure with a tougher enforcement mechanism, Proposition 79, has been promoted by consumer activists.

In addition, forces opposed to Schwarzenegger, led by organized labor, have spent more than $100 million to beat him at the polls. The governor has raised and spent more than $50 million on behalf of his measures, including more than $7 million from his own pocket.

The two other initiatives on the special election ballot, Propositions 73 and 80, deal with abortion and electricity regulation, respectively, and have drawn considerably less notice.

The governor spent the final day of the campaign skipping from Chico to Roseville to San Ramon to Fresno to Corona to Orange to Del Mar.

At the Riverside County Young Republican headquarters in a Corona strip mall, Schwarzenegger made calls to five voters. A volunteer dialed the numbers and handed the receiver to the governor. “I’m sorry that I bothered you,” he told one woman. “I wanted to make sure you go out and vote.”

Protesters continued to dog him, as they have throughout the year.

About 100 demonstrators gathered outside the Cozy Diner in Chico, the governor’s first stop of the day, holding signs calling for a “no” vote on his slate of measures. The passenger in a city firetruck drew applause as he rode past, using a loudspeaker to voice opposition to Proposition 75, the union dues measure.

Inside the diner, a smiling Schwarzenegger moved through the crowd of GOP boosters, shaking hands and handing out voter guides. A protester briefly disrupted the event by shouting out his objection to the measure that would stiffen teacher-tenure requirements. Police quickly escorted him outside.

In San Ramon, an affluent Bay Area suburb, Schwarzenegger spent about 30 minutes working his way through about 100 GOP activists at the Hopyard Ale House. The entrance was carefully guarded by the governor’s aides to keep out the uninvited.

Schwarzenegger handed out ballot pamphlets, autographing several. He also posed for photos and urged everyone to make a hard push to get supportive voters to the polls today.

Bags were clearly visible under the governor’s eyes as he said: “We’re working very hard. We started at 6 in the morning and we’re going to go all the way until 11 at night. And I love it. You know why I love it? It’s because we’re fighting for the future of California.”

Across the state, labor unions rallied once again to rev up their members, fighting what they termed Schwarzenegger’s effort to destroy their political power.

In Oakland, actor-director Rob Reiner joined the union rank and file at a phone bank. In the Silicon Valley, teachers demonstrated against Schwarzenegger at a mall. In Burbank, union volunteers gathered at a union hall to kick off canvassing in the San Fernando Valley.

There the governor’s critics hammered Schwarzenegger in remarks to 200 volunteers, many of them waving “No on 75” signs and wearing white T-shirts with stenciled photos of a nurse, teacher and firefighter.

“When you see the governor on the run in a bus, afraid to debate, you know you’ve done something right,” Ludlow told the crowd, referring to Schwarzenegger’s refusal during the campaign to share a stage with his opponents.

Democrats were nervously watching the weather in their Los Angeles stronghold, fearing that rain could depress the turnout of party loyalists. “We’ve been buying up ponchos left and right and dropping them off at all of our staging areas,” said Courtni Pugh, the Los Angeles County campaign manager for labor’s anti-Schwarzenegger coalition.

Election officials forecast a voter turnout of 42%, a respectable number for an odd-numbered year. Turnout in California was 76% in the hard-fought 2004 presidential election race, 61% in the 2003 recall and 51% in the 2002 governor’s contest.

Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Dan Morain, Jean O. Pasco, Jordan Rau and Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.