COLUMN ONE : Targeting the Many Californias : Strategists in the race for governor are keenly aware of political geography, tailoring messages to the state’s regions. Reducing a margin of loss in unfriendly territory can be as vital as victory in a stronghold.

Clint Reilly knows what needs to be done for his candidate, Democratic state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, to win the race for governor. He says so right there in black and white, in the 11-page “campaign analysis” he printed up shortly after taking control of Brown’s campaign last spring:

Win big in San Francisco.

Improve on Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s 1990 gubernatorial victory in Los Angeles County.

Lose San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and Ventura counties, which Feinstein also lost, but “reduce the margin of defeat.”

On the other side of the furious battle for governor, campaign advisers for incumbent Republican Pete Wilson have made equally blunt calculations.

While it might seem odd to publicly predict defeats, the campaigns’ analyses reflect the reality of California politics: Most regions vote so similarly election to election that pretty fair odds on the general outcome can be laid months in advance.

Rather than trying to win every county this November, the campaigns are moving on three fronts: seeking to secure counties that their parties traditionally win; tussling over a few areas that actually change hands, and engaging in a voter-by-voter struggle to lessen the margin of defeat in areas they know they will lose.

“What Clint will attempt to do is raise issues and attack us to whittle down the margins and we will attempt to do the same thing,” said Joe Shumate, a Wilson campaign adviser who has studied the state’s demography.

Added Wilson’s campaign manager, George Gorton: “Everything is in the percentages.”

Geography alone does not determine a candidate’s destiny. Campaign managers know, for example, that they can strike different chords among men and women, liberals and conservatives, environmentalists and business people, even when they live in the same neighborhoods.

That individual complexity is magnified by the state’s sheer size. Unlike, say, New Hampshire, the length of which can be driven in a few hours, California is a massive compilation of more than a dozen media markets, its counties ranging from liberal San Francisco to conservative Orange, all further complicated by the presence of swing voters who change loyalties year to year.

Nonetheless, geographic voting patterns have a certain consistency that allows strategists to determine almost everything about a race--the message a candidate sends, the placement of television advertising (which is all-important in this media-dependent state) and a candidate’s campaign events themselves.

It was no accident, for instance, that the first ads touting Brown’s vow to enforce the death penalty did not run in San Francisco, the most liberal county in the state. Instead, ads detailing her support for public education--a far less polarizing issue--were substituted.

It is also no accident that 45% of Brown’s time since the June primary has been spent in the Los Angeles media market, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties. Voters in the market cast 44% of all votes in November, 1992, according to a survey by the Los Angeles Times Poll. Mighty Los Angeles County accounted for 25% of votes cast in 1992, making it a required asset for any winning candidate.

“In 1990, Wilson won (the governorship) by 266,000 votes,” said Brown spokesman John Whitehurst. “He won the L.A. media market by more than 300,000 votes. One could argue that in the determination of this election, the Los Angeles media market will be very significant.”

Brown’s gubernatorial team is engaged in an unprecedented effort to run regionalized campaigns, emphasizing quite different issues, in several key areas of the state.

“We’re actually trying to run five to six campaigns at one time,” said Reilly.

It is with good reason that Democrats are attempting to come up with a new way to run statewide campaigns. Except for 1992, the party’s successes in recent years have been meager. From 1980 until 1992, the only Democrat to win a top-of-the-ticket statewide race was U.S. Senate veteran Alan Cranston, who retired in 1992.

Despite consistent Democrat leads in statewide voter registration, only two counties have voted Democratic in all of the three most recent governor’s races: San Francisco and Alameda.

Even ignoring one of the three, the disastrous 1986 race in which George Deukmejian won every county but those two in defeating Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, the predictable Democratic turf is narrow indeed.

Besides San Francisco and Alameda, only six of the state’s 58 counties have consistently voted Democratic at the top of a statewide ticket for governor or senator: the Northern California suburban counties of Marin, Mendocino, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Yolo. Sonoma has voted Democratic since 1988.

Even Los Angeles County, which is tailor-made for Democrats, broke with its traditional leanings to vote for Republicans Deukmejian in 1986 and Wilson in the 1988 Senate race. All told, Democrats have had their best successes along the narrow coastline and Republicans have controlled everything else for more than a decade.

“Not a pretty sight,” grimaced Reilly about the Democratic map.

Needless to say, the 1992 results shocked even Democrats. Not only did Bill Clinton and Al Gore become the first Democratic presidential team to win California in 28 years, but Democrats captured both Senate seats with victories by Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

Geographically, Democrats surged inland, after having seized only small slices of the coast for nearly a generation. Clinton and Feinstein in particular grabbed territory that had been dominated by Republicans for years.

While still limited to the western side of the state, where Democrats have been more popular over the years, Boxer won 19 counties. Feinstein controlled 36 counties--20 more than she had won two years before in the governor’s race, including all of north-central California from San Francisco to the Nevada border. And Clinton won 37 counties, including the usual Republican stalwarts of Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura.

The question of 1994: Was 1992 a fluke?

Democrats are nervous about predicting that such advances are permanent, but the state party’s campaign adviser, Bob Mulholland, argues that California is at least becoming friendlier to Democratic candidates.

“Prior to the end of the Cold War, the Republicans had a lock on this state,” he said. “All because we were seen as weak on communism and Republicans as strong. . . . The hold the Republicans had, like Russia on Eastern Europe, is ending.”

But Mulholland acknowledges that Republicans were at a severe disadvantage in 1992: President George Bush conceded California months before the election, leaving the state without a competitive candidacy at the top of the ticket and without a complementary get-out-the-vote effort. Independent Ross Perot siphoned off more Republican votes, to Clinton’s advantage.

In one of the Senate races, the well-known Feinstein was up against little-known Republican John Seymour, who had been appointed to the Senate less than two years earlier. Boxer won the second seat with a far narrower victory over Republican Bruce Herschensohn.

Clinton and Feinstein succeeded at least in part because they campaigned as moderates, appealing to members of their own party but also to independents and liberal Republicans.

So-called swing voters, such as those attracted to Clinton and Feinstein, tend to inhabit the middle regions of the political spectrum. That is why successful politicians in politically split states such as California most often tread moderate ground.

The strategy can pay off even in the most polarized counties. In San Francisco, a significant percentage of voters cross party lines election to election. A Republican who wins 40% of the vote there has pulled off the equivalent of a landslide victory, even if it technically spells defeat, because it represents the maximum number of Republican votes plus swing voters.

“No Republican is going to get more than 40% in the Bay Area unless the Democrat is a complete boob, and no Republican gets less than 32% unless he’s a complete boob,” said Wilson manager Gorton. “So you’re looking at an 8% swing.”

For Democrats, getting just a third of the vote in Orange County is, similarly, a cause for exultation, because it signals the maximum possible score.

Despite the efforts of Democrat Brown to establish a moderate profile to appeal to those voters, many demographers say recent polling suggests that voters are returning to pre-1992, GOP-leaning patterns.

Independent demographer Bruce Cain, associate director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, said that while some electoral changes are afoot, there has as yet been no wholesale adjustment in voter attitudes that could maintain Democratic primacy.

“It’s going to be very hard to recreate the Clinton victory without a third party in there,” Cain said.

Brown’s campaign is not taking the 1992 results for granted. Its strategy is built not on those successes but on the Democratic near-miss in the 1990 governor’s race.

Campaign manager Reilly is convinced that the state is on the cusp of partisan change. He contends that the Clinton, Feinstein and Boxer victories in 1992 were nourished by voters worried about the domestic economy and ready to blame Republicans for it.

The same set of circumstances will recur this year as Californians blame incumbent Wilson for the state’s economic difficulties, Reilly argues. (The latest Los Angeles Times Poll indicated that theory is a tough sell right now, since Californians trust Wilson more than Brown with handling the rocky economy.)

In brief, Reilly believes that to win, Brown will have to carry the Bay Area, Sacramento and its suburbs and Los Angeles County. He believes she can lose everywhere else, but she must hold down the size of the defeat. His goals in some counties may seem marginal--winning 35% in Orange, for example, compared to Feinstein’s 31% showing in 1990 and 42% in San Diego compared to Feinstein’s 36% --but they add up to hundreds of thousands of votes.

Reilly sees Wilson as vulnerable in the most important emerging areas of the state, the Inland Empire and, to the north, greater Sacramento and the suburbs at the northern edge of the Central Valley.

Both areas have traditionally voted Republican. But demographers believe voters there are particularly blase about party loyalty and receptive to promises to improve their lot in life from either conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans.

What the areas have in common are increasing numbers of commuters who live in new developments far from their jobs, and who do not necessarily share the traditional political views of the area.

“As they sit on the freeway commuting two to three hours a day and living in something less than the middle-class opulence that they had as kids, there is a disconnect that either party can tap,” said UC Berkeley’s Cain.

In its regional emphasis, Brown’s campaign differs sharply from past efforts by either Democrats or Republicans.

Usually, a campaign will run one --or at most two--ads statewide at a time. At one point recently, Brown was running five commercials in different media markets. She was hitting the state budget deficit and government mismanagement in Sacramento, Wilson’s parole policies in Fresno and the Sierras, education in the Bay Area, and jobs in Los Angeles.

Her campaign spokesman Whitehurst said Brown plans to run ads in at least five media markets that focus on narrow regional issues. So far, Los Angeles and San Diego voters have seen separate ads that blame Wilson for those areas’ economic troubles.

“We are purposely mixing it up and not being consistent,” Whitehurst said.

The Wilson campaign’s approach is far different, somewhat akin to testing spaghetti against a wall: They throw what they have and see how well it sticks.

“Reilly looks at it precinct by precinct,” said Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur. “We look at it a lot more holistically. An issue might move (voters) differently in San Diego than in San Francisco. But the 40% of the vote you could get in San Francisco needs to hear it as much as the 60% in San Diego.”

Wilson campaign manager Gorton airily dismisses Reilly’s charts and graphs of geographic voter preferences, despite the Wilson team’s own recent decision to run slightly different ads in San Diego and Los Angeles counties.

“Clint does that because he’s never won a statewide race before,” said Gorton, ignoring Reilly’s two statewide victories as campaign manager for former state schools superintendent Bill Honig. “That’s a great approach if you’re running a state Legislature race.”

Gorton does, however, have a track record to back up his holistic approach, since he has helped lead Wilson to one gubernatorial and two Senate victories.

He said that Wilson’s potential supporters in the more liberal Bay Area “respond to similar themes” as do his partisans in conservative Orange County, although the pool of susceptible voters is smaller, percentage-wise, in the north than in the south.

In the suburban southern counties of Orange, San Bernardino, Ventura and Riverside, he said, Wilson could roll up 60% of the vote--a margin that, if realized, would essentially deny Brown the election.

Other than the Bay Area, Gorton refuses to concede much territory to Brown. He even suggests that Wilson has a shot at winning Los Angeles County, as he did in his 1988 U.S. Senate race.

“We can win L.A. County, and we would like to,” he said. “We can certainly run up the score in the surrounding . . . counties.”

The emphasis on mammoth Los Angeles and other geographically important counties can have its downside because, by extension, it takes for granted the state’s less populated areas. Political demographer Shumate cautions that the old saying still holds: Every vote counts.

In the 1990 race for state attorney general, he recalled, Republican Dan Lungren beat Democrat Arlo Smith by fewer than 30,000 votes out of almost 7.3 million cast.

“If you can tell me the candidate will win the election by a million votes, I can tell you a whole slew of places that don’t matter,” he said.

“In a close election, every vote in every place counts.”

The Political Geography of California

California’s political geography is not a comfortable sight for Democrats. More counties have gone Republican in recent years than Democratic. To chart a political map of the state, Times Poll Director John Brennan analyzed six races for U.S. Senate and governor from 1986 to 1992.

Democractic Stronghold: Democrats can count on winning these North Coast counties, but only a walloping margin, at least 18 percentage overall, is indicative of enough strength for statewide victory.

GOP Strongholds: Republicans can count on winning these counties, but they need to rack up substantial margins to contribute to statewide victory. Republicans need to win in Orange County by at least 30 percentage points. In more moderately Republican areas, such as Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties, Republicans need at least 19-point margins, in years that they won statewide offices.

GOP-Leaning Swing Counties: The counties can be won by either party, but lean toward Republicans--Democrats average between 40% and 50% of the vote in the swing counties of central California and the Sierras.

Sacramento County: If there is a bellwether county in California, it may well be Sacramento, which has sided with the winner in every election for governor and U.S. Senate since 1982.

Los Angeles County: Los Angeles County, with a quarter of the state’s voters, tends to be Democratic but is crucial for both parties. Republicans who win Los Angeles win the state; Democrats generally have to win by a margin of at least 11 points for statewide victory.