Not your typical California election

Three weeks from Tuesday, California will close out an election season that mixed illegal immigrants and Nazis, demon sheep and overseas jobs, global warming and dope smoking. More surprising, it will also close out an election that mattered.

Gone was the typical California contest, in which the results could be divined months, if not years, in advance.

California has not had a competitive race for U.S. Senate since 1994, but this year Democratic control of the U.S. Senate may rest on whether three-term incumbent Barbara Boxer can thwart a barrage of attacks from her opponent, Republican Carly Fiorina.

California has not had a competitive race for governor since 1990, but Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown were fighting furiously in a battle played out on television, on radio, on billboards and in mailboxes.

For Republicans, the California election has offered a chance to rebound from the drubbings of the last two decades and, with an unusually diverse field of statewide candidates, redefine the party in a state that long ago consigned it to minority status.

For Democrats, the California election has been a rare opportunity for success in a national landscape littered with woe, as the country’s economic concerns fueled a backlash against the party in control of the White House and Congress.

Voters also will decide all of the statewide offices and nine ballot measures that confirm California’s reputation for taking democracy to the extreme.

Among the best known of the measures is Proposition 23, which would stall the state’s landmark global warming law. Its financing, largely from out-of-state oil companies, set up a familiar battle between energy interests and environmental groups.

Proposition 25 touches on the perennial frustrations of the California budget and would drop the legislative approval needed to pass one from two-thirds to a simple majority — a move that, had it been in effect in recent years, would have given Democrats power to pass a budget without Republican votes.

Proposition 19 occupies the requisite only-in-California position on the ballot; it would legalize marijuana use and cultivation and allow those activities to be taxed.

It has been a breathtakingly expensive campaign: more than $140 million spent by Whitman alone, including $121.5 million of her own money, a record for any political race in the country.

Yet underlying it all is the unsettled environment in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is lumbering to the end of his tenure as governor with dismal ratings, where the Legislature’s popularity is as low as the unemployment rate is high and where faith in the future is utterly absent.

The results will tell California something about itself: whether wealthy first-time candidates can break tradition and win; whether the national anti-incumbent sentiment extends to the Pacific; whether the state’s laissez-faire sentiments on cultural issues will extend to the law-and-order realm.

By appearances, this election has in its DNA two earlier contests. In 1978, Californians revolted over property taxes and passed Proposition 13. In 1994, Californians lashed at illegal immigration and passed Proposition 187. But even with huge majorities convinced that the state has ridden off the rails, the unrest seems less focused now, as if discontent has yet to find its target.

“Normally when you get those kinds of numbers, you see the citizenry taking to the streets with torches and revolting against something,” said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic consultant and interim director of the Los Angeles Times/USC Poll. “When voters get that unhappy, they usually take it out on something. But in this cycle, there has been no foil for all that unhappiness.”

The magnitude of California’s problems has not altered the typical terrain of campaigns, and the big races have thus far pivoted around character and values more than issue positions. The candidates have danced around the bleak options, particularly for the state budget, beset this year by a $19-billion shortfall atop years of cutbacks.

None of the major candidates has been particularly well-liked by voters; all of them have had to fight negative attributes that accrued by virtue of their professions.

The Democrats — gubernatorial candidate Brown, a 40-year inhabitant of elective office, and three-term Senate incumbent Boxer — must convince voters that they are the rare veterans worth rewarding in a year that has often equated experience with defeat.

The Republicans — former EBay chief Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard head Fiorina, both novice candidates — must convince voters that corporate experience is a plus, even if the country is still reeling from a Wall Street-complicit economic meltdown.

For Democrats, the opponents’ business backgrounds have been used to paint the Republicans as rapacious elites. In perhaps the sharpest Democratic ad of the campaign, Boxer accused Fiorina of laying off 30,000 workers to enrich herself. The ad showed footage from a 2008 interview in which Fiorina defended shipping jobs overseas.

“When you’re talking about massive layoffs, which we did … perhaps the work needs to be done somewhere else?” Fiorina was shown saying in the ad. To her detriment, Fiorina remained unknown to many voters despite attempts at gaining notice through vehicles such as an ad featuring red-eyed humanoid sheep.

Brown took after Whitman in his most recent ad, which recapped her receipt of early stock offerings from Goldman Sachs. Whitman was forced to return almost $1.8 million of her profits to EBay stockholders as part of a lawsuit settlement.

“We’re choosing a governor; shouldn’t character matter?” Brown’s ad asked. In debates, he relentlessly attacked Whitman as someone whose main fiscal goal was eradicating the capital gains tax to benefit herself and her fellow billionaires and millionaires.

As the campaign closed, the biggest danger to Whitman was that she would become an amalgam of the criticisms thrown at her — a rich first-time candidate who did not vote most of her life, who secretly settled with a former employee who alleged age discrimination and with another whom she shoved, and that she treated her longtime illegal immigrant housekeeper coldly when the woman asked for help gaining legal status. The housekeeper appeared at three news conferences in recent days with attorney Gloria Allred.

“Fighting with Gloria Allred … is not where the Whitman campaign wants to be” at this stage of the campaign, said Republican consultant Mike Madrid, who said Whitman had to avoid coming to represent “the entitlement of the wealthy” in voters’ minds.

Brown and Boxer had their own problems, however, on which Republicans sought mightily to capitalize. In a year notable for voters tossing out veterans, the Democratic duo were as veteran as they come, and Republicans fought to cast them as overstaying their welcome.

Brown, who first served as governor at age 36, half his lifetime ago, was captured in Whitman ads as a relic from the ‘60s, forever feeding at the public trough and bent on raising taxes rather making government work. Brown also made his own faux pas, comparing Whitman’s campaign to a Nazi propagandist’s and insulting former Democratic president Bill Clinton, as Whitman worked to make him appear undisciplined and out of touch.

“You know what? I come from the real world where you actually have to get things done,” Whitman said during their second debate.

Boxer, too, came in for mocking from Fiorina, who cast her as a do-nothing senator who pushed through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and defined extremism.

“I’ll really go to work to end the arrogance in Washington,” Fiorina said, meaning Boxer herself.

In the end, by the time the polls close Nov. 2, voters will have decided.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com