NEWS ANALYSIS : Voters Opted to Play It Safe With a Dependable Wilson : Governor: Republican’s decision to stake his chances on a nuts-and-bolts campaign may have been decisive.

In the end, Californians chose a new governor who represented more caution than change, a minimum-risk, experienced officeholder who seemed dependable if dull.

With the nation on the brink of war, recession jitters rampant and higher taxes taking more from their pockets, voters decided this was not the time to gamble on putting the first woman in the governor’s office, especially a woman from liberal San Francisco.

It clearly was not an easy decision for many voters. The Los Angeles Times Poll, from summer until the final week of the campaign, repeatedly had found the candidates to be running virtually even. They still were on Election Day until U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson finally eked out a win of less than three percentage points in the pre-dawn hours on Wednesday.

Fittingly, the tenacious but colorless Republican staked his chances on an unexciting, nuts-and-bolts operation that turned out hundreds of thousands of voters who cast ballots for him both by mail and at neighborhood precincts on Tuesday.

Wilson’s campaign and the Republican Party spent $7 million to contact virtually every GOP household in California, dropping off registration forms and absentee ballot applications--6.5 million of them--and following up by carting countless signed documents to local voter registrars. On Election Day, Wilson had 35,000 workers knocking on Republican doors and making phone calls. All this may well have made the difference, a Times exit poll showed.

By contrast, Democrat Dianne Feinstein poured her scarce money into television commercials and mounted only minimal absentee and get-out-the-vote efforts.

Some Democrats pointed fingers of blame at the state party chairman, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., for dropping the ball on the political basics of registering voters, sending them absentee ballots and getting them to the polls on Election Day. Feinstein did not exactly join the anti-Brown chorus at her concession press conference in San Francisco, but she did let it be known she was upset with the state party.

“I’m not blaming anyone,” she said. “I’m just saying the Republicans in registration were 2 to 1 what we were. In get-out-the-vote, they were 5 to 1. In the absentee ballot campaign they were much greater. And that is a fundamental difference in a contested race.”

Her campaign chairman, Duane Garrett, was not so gentle with the former governor.

“We got (Brown’s) political baggage; we didn’t get the untold vast millions” of dollars he promised for organizing.

Brown has had his eye on running for a U.S. Senate seat, perhaps the one Wilson now will be vacating. On the morning after she had narrowly lost the governorship, Feinstein hinted she herself may want to run for Wilson’s seat. “Clearly it’s an option,” she told reporters.

At a victory press conference in San Diego, Wilson compared his winning race to “a football game between two good teams.” His campaign director, Otto Bos, added later that “we had a better game plan.” The analogy was not bad: Wilson, in fact, did grind out steady yardage with a somewhat boring, conservative ground game that provided little crowd excitement.

“The voters were roughly satisfied with the status quo, but fairly fearful of the future and accordingly chose the least adventuresome, the more cautious and the most reassuring candidate,” said independent-minded Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento), echoing the views of several academicians and politicians. “The strategy was to be OK on the environment, a little bit different, but don’t be too exciting or interesting. Be status quo.”

Wilson did not want to be too status quo, however. He wanted to separate himself in voters’ minds from the lame-duck Republican governor, George Deukmejian, whose ratings in the polls have steadily fallen. “We showed voters he would be more activist than George Deukmejian, without the risks that a total change (to Feinstein) would entail,” said one Wilson strategist who did not want to be identified.

The Republican and his strategists made two key decisions very early in the campaign. One was to invest heavily in old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts organization. But long before that, they decided on four issues to repeatedly emphasize: education, quality of life, crime and drugs, and taxes and spending.

Hitting education and the environment early tended to undermine Feinstein’s built-in advantage on these issues. Because of gender bias, which has been documented by The Times Poll and other national polling organizations, women candidates naturally are perceived by voters to be better than men on such subjects as education, the environment, health care and ethics. But there is a flip side to the gender bias: Male candidates are perceived to be better on crime, taxes, spending, managing the economy.

Feinstein’s “caring” issues, including abortion rights, worked well for her during the Democratic primary. But things began to go sour when she blundered into promising to appoint women and minorities to government jobs in proportion to their shares of the population--something that sounded very much like quotas to most people. Wilson jumped on most voters’ resentment of quotas, attacking with a TV commercial. “There was no question the quotas ad hurt,” Feinstein acknowledged Wednesday.

Then the playing field changed dramatically for Feinstein on Aug. 2 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The voters’ attention and priorities shifted. Instead of thinking about making history by electing California’s first woman government--an exciting prospect for many--voters began fretting about the falling economy and rising taxes, male-oriented bread-and-butter issues that especially helped Wilson.

“That, we didn’t anticipate,” conceded a Feinstein strategist, who did not want to be identified. “The political environment changed.”

Using again the football analogy, Wilson then threw the one “bomb” of the campaign: endorsing Proposition 140, the popular term limits initiative, and timing it for the widely viewed candidates’ TV debate. “That turned the world upside down,” said Bos, who pointed out that Feinstein’s refusal to endorse the measure undercut her image as an “agent of change.”

Last--but very important--Wilson was able to raise more campaign money than Feinstein, roughly $21 million to her $18 million, aides reported.

“We came out of the primary with nothing in the bank,” Feinstein lamented Wednesday while again pushing a pet proposal: that television be required to provide free time for political candidates.

Times staff writer Virginia Ellis contributed to this story.