California Elections : Zschau and Cranston Fire TV Salvos--Now Come the Polls

Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ed Zschau spent more than $2 million attacking Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston in television ads during the month of September. Cranston spent $1 million attacking Zschau.

Then they held their breath.

Although both candidates were doing polling, they were anxious to see the results of two independent surveys.

The first of these, by Teichner Associates of Southern California, came out Sunday and shows Cranston leading Zschau 49% to 37%, a 12-point spread that is not much different from a 14-point advantage Cranston had in an early September poll by Teichner. An early September poll by the Los Angeles Times showed Cranston leading by 15 points.

“We took Zschau’s best shot in September and the lead is still in double digits,” said Cranston spokesman Kam Kuwata.

Zschau’s TV commercials accused Cranston of being soft on efforts to stop drug trafficking and terrorism. One particularly grim ad showed pictures of bodies in airports and of a woman crying, and noted that Cranston has always opposed the death penalty for convicted terrorists.

But pollster Steven Teichner said Sunday that his survey found “no evidence that the ads were getting people who lean toward Cranston to rethink their support.”

Teichner surveyed 1,200 California voters by telephone over the weekend. He said the margin of error was plus or minus 2.8%.

The undecided in the earlier Teichner poll was 13%. That category is 11% in the new survey. The respondents who said they favored candidates other than Cranston or Zschau dropped from 6% to 3%.

Teichner said Zschau was demonstrating the ability to pick up support from the undecided and “other” categories but was not pulling votes from Cranston.

How bad is the news for Zschau in the Teichner poll?

“The survey did not pick up the kind of movement (by Zschau) that one would have expected if you were planning on the race being even by the middle of October,” Teichner said.

“I have long maintained that both this race and the governor’s race have one thing in common, and that is that the incumbents exist in a comfort zone,” Teichner continued. “Zschau’s inability to take support from Cranston indicates that those people in the comfort zone haven’t been touched by the campaign.”

The 12-point Cranston lead in Teichner’s poll is similar to the margin in a new survey done for the senator by Patrick Caddell.

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By contrast, Zschau’s polling, done by Decision Making Information, has shown the Los Altos congressman gaining dramatically on Cranston since Labor Day. Zschau pollster Gary Lawrence recently released overnight tracking of voter opinion that had Cranston’s lead dropping to less than three points.

“Teichner’s results are so different from ours that we wonder about them,” said Zschau campaign manager Ron Smith. “We think that as the voters focus on Alan Cranston and his record in the final weeks of the campaign there will be a shift to us and we’ll win.”

Zschau himself said Saturday that he is convinced he has closed the gap on Cranston since September.

Asked what he expected to see in the Teichner poll and in another survey that will be published later this week by San Francisco pollster Mervin Field, Zschau said, “I guess I would have to be less than 10 points behind to justify what I have been saying.”