In Race to Win, Calif. Can Be a Drag

On the final weekend before the presidential campaign’s single biggest primary day, the candidates were galloping around the country in search of votes. But in California, they might as well have been running in place.

Despite millions of dollars in advertising and final in-state passes by the Republican candidates Sunday and today, the GOP and Democratic nominating races occupied roughly the same territory they have commanded for weeks.

Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, their parties’ establishment princes, held firm leads within their own ranks against challengers John McCain and Bill Bradley, whose campaigns here were characterized more by lost opportunities than successes.

In California as elsewhere, the biggest opportunity was McCain’s. According to analysts, the Arizona senator had huge potential here, particularly among the coastal Republicans who tend to be more moderate than their Central Valley peers. But McCain never concentrated much on that fertile ground.

Republican analyst Tony Quinn, echoing the comments of others, said McCain simply got off track here, losing his reformist message in the back-and-forth with the Texas governor about the religious right and campaign tactics.

McCain and his camp “got themselves off message,” Quinn said. “I thought he would have had much more traction here.”

The Democratic race, meanwhile, never got off the ground. Analysts had long seen evidence of weakness in support for Vice President Gore, but Bradley never came up with the themes to win over teetering Democrats.

“Bradley had his moment, but in the final analysis, he was not able to articulate a reason for the Democrats to abandon [Gore],” said Darry Sragow, a veteran state Democratic consultant.

A Grueling State for Underdogs

All told, the primary campaigns underscore a basic truth about California politics: Despite all the national nattering about the state’s quirky image, it is immensely difficult for underdogs to mount a successful campaign. The place is too big, too expensive and too distracted from politics to allow most insurgent campaigns to succeed.

“California is obviously a huge nut to crack when you are the underdog campaign, the underfinanced campaign,” Sragow said. “It’s pretty hard to make something happen in California unless you focus entirely on the state.”

That, of course, has not been possible. Since Bradley was defeated by Gore in New Hampshire a month ago, the former New Jersey senator has traveled from coast to coast, trying to build momentum somewhere. He spent days in Washington state, hoping for a bounce in last Tuesday’s nonbinding primary--a hope that proved vain. Everywhere he has gone since then, he has faced plummeting poll numbers. A Los Angeles Times poll published last week showed him behind Gore by a 5-1 margin among California Democrats.

For the Republicans, California has taken a back seat to hand-to-hand combat in a succession of states after McCain’s big win in New Hampshire: South Carolina, where Bush triumphed; Michigan, where McCain again upended Bush and Washington, where Bush cut off McCain’s momentum for a second time.

The Times poll found Bush with a comfortable lead among California’s Republican voters, 47% to 26%, and even McCain aides have stopped suggesting that he could win the 162 delegates at stake Tuesday.

But the California election is really two races in one: the delegate selection, to be determined by a party’s voters; and the overall results, which will measure popularity but have no bearing on the delegate disbursement.

As the race closed in, McCain supporters remained hopeful that the senator could beat Bush in the popular vote by attracting enough Democrats and independents to offset Bush’s lead among Republicans. At least, they argued, he would then have bragging rights.

Polls released last week showed Bush with a narrow lead over McCain in the popular vote. But McCain advisors were hoping that a combination of criticism over campaign ads touting Bush in New York and McCain’s visits here today and Tuesday would boost the turnout of McCain voters.

McCain’s schedule today includes stops in Santa Clara, at UCLA and in San Diego. Bush plans to visit San Diego, Long Beach and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

McCain senior advisor Ken Khachigian admitted that the campaign suffered last week, when it was embroiled in controversies about McCain’s attacks on leaders of the religious right and on his refusal to attend a Los Angeles debate with Bush and the third GOP candidate, Alan Keyes.

“There’s no question that there were a lot of distractions that made it difficult for us,” Khachigian said. But, he added: “We have time to recover.”

The more fundamental question is whether McCain made the most of his campaign here--and analysts strongly believe he did not. McCain spent much of his time traveling in areas locked up by Bush and ignoring, until today, the more moderate coastal areas where many believe he could have turned the tide. He also muddied his reformist image, which so helped him in New Hampshire and Michigan, by being put on the defensive by Bush in California.

There is some question, however, about whether even the sharpest of campaigns could have produced victory for McCain among Republicans.

Candidates Scramble for Position

“Gov. Bush was here first,” said state Sen. Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga, the leader of Bush’s forces in California. “He was here first, with the most, and he closed a lot of the sale before John McCain even hit anybody’s radar screen.”

The contest for the 367 Democratic delegates at stake Tuesday was a far more muted affair. Gore and Bradley left the state for good at midweek, Gore confident that his massive lead would hold and Bradley searching for a state where he had better odds of mounting a last-minute surge.

As happened in New Hampshire, McCain’s national surge drew the spotlight away from Bradley. And without attention, Bradley’s campaign was doomed. He spent more than $3 million on advertisements here. And while that is a huge sum elsewhere, in California it barely makes a dent. Consider: In the 1998 governor’s race, Democrat Al Checchi spent $40 million, most of it on television, to try to defeat a Gore-like Gray Davis. He failed.

For both challengers, a continuing problem was finding a way to communicate with California’s 14 million registered voters. The state’s TV outlets are notoriously reluctant to cover politics; on the last weekend before the primary, the candidates had to compete with weird weather and the usual assortment of criminals for air time.

“If they want to get on the stations, they have to have their bus chased by the Highway Patrol down the Harbor Freeway,” said Allen Hoffenblum, publisher of the California Target Book, a compendium of political information.

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Profile: California

Population: 32.7 million (1998 est.)California’s population is 25% Latino. Latinos may be of any race, so their totals may overlap with white or black racial categories. Numbers do not add up to 100% due to rounding.