California governor’s race a tossup for Central Valley’s GOP voters

Jessica Heard stands on the field level of Chukchansi Park, where the Triple-A Fresno Grizzlies are losing to the Nashville Sounds. But it’s a different contest entirely that has etched a furrow in her brow.

The 33-year-old Republican used to think she could vote for Meg Whitman in California’s fast-approaching GOP gubernatorial primary. But that was millions of dollars and hours of nasty campaign ads ago. Now she doesn’t know what she’ll do in the voting booth June 8.

“When she started, and she ran the ads first, and she talked about EBay and how she ran the company, and she’d be able to make our state work again, it was golden,” Heard said with a sigh. “But then the other ads came out, and now I wonder, ‘Who is she?’ ”

The former EBay chief executive’s 50-point lead against GOP opponent Steve Poizner has withered to single digits over the last two months, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California. A third of those likely voters surveyed said they still were undecided.

A score of voters interviewed here in the unofficial capital of the largely conservative Central Valley pin the blame for Whitman’s slide mostly on an advertising barrage that has clogged the airwaves and muddled the race.

Some, like Heard, point to specific Poizner ads for clouding their once-sunny view — for example, “the Goldman Sachs thing and the voting one,” she said Friday night as baseball fans cheered and mariachi fiddled. “It makes you have a hard decision, trying to figure out the truth.”

The “Goldman Sachs thing” was a recent 30-second Poizner spot charging that Whitman “helped manage Goldman and received sweetheart stock deals so unethical they were outlawed.”

The commercial refers to money Whitman made by selling initial public offering stocks to which she had special access; Wall Street firms agreed to stop the practice in a settlement with securities regulators. In a recent debate, Whitman said she “did not do anything wrong.”

The “voting one” was a television ad that flashed a grainy black-and-white photo of a tight-lipped Whitman, with a voice-over that said, “She didn’t skip some votes, as she claims. She skipped every one — for 28 years.”

Whitman spokeswoman Sarah Pompei called the ad “an absolute and total lie” and said that “Meg registered as a Republican in 1982 and has voted for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, and Steve Poizner knows it.”

Other voters in this beleaguered region — where unemployment is 16.9% and nearly half of all homes with mortgages are worth less than what is owed on them — are angered by the sheer volume of commercials and the millions of dollars spent to air them. Such complaints tend to target the former EBay billionaire more than the insurance commissioner.

“I’m just overloaded with Meg commercials,” Stan Yates, a commercial carpenter and Harley Davidson aficionado, said as he waited for the start of a motorcycle parade through this agricultural city’s downtrodden downtown.

Whitman has spent an estimated $68 million of her own money on the race, which Yates said he’s “repulsed by.” He has no idea whom he’s going to vote for. He doesn’t know much about Poizner, he said, and right now he likes “frankly, nobody.”

“When [Whitman has] fallen behind in the polls, does she go to the people and explain herself?” he asked, incredulous. “No. It’s go to the bank and flood the airwaves with more commercials.”

Rick Layman, a city building inspector, said he tunes out all political ads the moment they appear on his television set and doesn’t know who he’ll vote for in the Republican primary. But he said he’s “impressed” by the level at which Whitman is bankrolling her campaign.

“I have a hard time thinking she’ll make that much back as governor,” he said as he lounged on his 2004 Harley Sportster. “It puts money into the economy. I’m not opposed to that.”

Fresno, in particular, could use a fiscal jolt. Friday’s motorcycle parade kicked off RevFest, a bike-and-blues festival aimed at jump-starting the city’s tattered core. The short route ran from the once-heralded Fulton Mall to Chukchansi Park, where the vehicles circled the baseball field.

When Fulton Mall opened in 1964, dotted with fountains and outdoor sculptures, it was “a bold experiment,” said Elliott Balch, Fresno’s downtown revitalization manager. “It was a retail hub for the valley.... Now there’s a 70% vacancy rate in the historic buildings.”

The ballpark, opened in 2002 for the San Francisco Giants farm team, is a rare downtown bright spot. On Friday, Grizzlies fans lined up early, waiting for the gates to open. After the motorcycles roared in, hundreds of young baseball players and scouts paraded around the field.

Realtor Mike Pappace, resplendent in Giants’ orange and black, filed into the park at 6:05 p.m., eager to see his son march in the Little League parade. Although he has followed the primary closely and leans toward Poizner, he said he is “going down to the wire” before he decides.

The 56-year-old longtime Fresno resident said he is untroubled by Whitman’s connection to Goldman Sachs and by Poizner’s efforts to link her to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a favorite target of the conservative right. But Whitman’s ads haven’t registered much, either.

Whitman has been running a radio spot in which the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. describes a potential Poizner governorship as “truly frightening to those who depend on Proposition 13 to protect their homes.”

But Pappace said he is seriously looking at Poizner because he believes the insurance commissioner will stand strong against tax hikes. That message, Pappace said, is finally getting through and is helping Poizner in the polls.

“He’s not a liberal spender,” Pappace said. “I think that’s getting out there.”

To many of those interviewed on the heels of the Public Policy Institute poll, Poizner is still a cipher less than three weeks before election day, but Whitman has a case of the getting-to-know-you blues.

“In the beginning, I kind of listened to her,” state elevator inspector Rob Bisnett said between innings. “The more I listened, the more I got nervous.”

The 51-year-old is a government employee, and he worries when he hears her pledge to streamline government. Yes, there’s inefficiency, he said, “but I just don’t think an overall sweep is the way to go.”

As the election nears, Bisnett acknowledges that there is still much he does not know. Like Poizner’s qualifications. And whom he will vote for.

But most of all, he said, “I don’t know why someone would spend $68 million to get a job that pays” around $200,000 a year. Especially since “a lot of the time, 50% of the people are pissed at you anyway.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com