Candidates Trudge On as Voters Tune Out

The major candidates for California governor struggled Saturday to rouse voters who have tuned out or grown turned off by months of ceaseless attacks, as the bitter contest hurtled into its final 48 hours.

Incumbent Democrat Gray Davis, the front-runner, had just a single event, a traditional get-out-the-vote rally at a Pittsburg union hall. “If you want to go forward, stick with the winning team in Sacramento,” Davis told about 200 ironworkers, painters and machinists, who spent the morning knocking on doors, urging people to the polls. “If you want to go backwards, the other guy’s your choice.”

Republican challenger Bill Simon Jr. covered more turf as he bid to make up ground, skipping up the coast from Santa Barbara to Monterey, then inland to San Jose and the Central Valley. “We only have to put up with Gray Davis for four days!” Simon shouted to roughly three dozen supporters at an airport rally in Santa Barbara. “Four more days,” the crowd chanted.

Simon, who traveled with other candidates on the state GOP ticket, is seeking to buck history: It has been 60 years since a California governor was denied a second term.

Davis, a target in Republican races across the state, was trying to make history as well. The governor was hoping not just to win a second term on Tuesday, but also to lead Democrats to the first party sweep of statewide offices since 1950.

Whoever wins the governorship, he will have little in the way of a mandate, given a campaign focused more on tactics and innuendo than anything either man hopes to accomplish in office.

“After most elections, you’ve learned something about what voters think about taxes or crime or abortion or immigration,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican communications strategist who sat out the governor’s race. “In this campaign, the two most significant questions are whether Gray Davis has been a corrupt governor and whether Bill Simon has been a competent candidate.”

Dispiriting as many find it, the race for governor will have important implications, not just in Sacramento -- where the next chief executive will immediately face a monstrous budget deficit -- but also in the 2004 presidential race, when California will figure heavily in both parties’ calculations.

Despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the two leading candidates, the 2002 governor’s race probably won’t be the most expensive in state history; that contest, topping $118 million, was held four years ago. It likely will not even be the costliest this year; in the New York governor’s race, three candidates, including a free-spending billionaire, will outpace California’s.

But it may set a record for voter discontent. Many analysts forecast the lowest turnout in modern California history.

“I have never seen, in the 30 years I’ve been watching, a greater dissatisfaction with the electoral process,” said Bruce Cain, an analyst at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies. “The emphasis on character assassination as the primary focus of the campaign has really bothered people and driven them up the wall.”

Of course, negative campaigning is hardly new. In fact, it is standard practice for incumbents like Davis with low popularity ratings and whose best chance to win, in the words of Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, is “by beating the daylights out of the alternative.”

Having succeeded in tarnishing Simon, Davis has lately devoted himself to rallying his party’s base, an effort that continued with Saturday’s union rally in Pittsburg.

With the sleeves of his blue dress shirt rolled up, Davis touted his record on union issues and promised to do more for organized labor in a second term. “This is not about me,” Davis told the workers, gathered in a parking lot wedged between warehouses and lumberyards in an industrial neighborhood. “I’m just the vehicle for your hopes and aspirations.”

He asked labor members to volunteer for at least one more shift of precinct walking -- and encouraged them to do three or four. “You can sleep in all day Wednesday,” the governor joked. “I’ll sign a note.” After the rally, Davis spent about 40 minutes talking to people in a nearby working-class neighborhood, urging them to vote.

At one house, Davis gave the family a leaflet touting union measures he had signed into law. “All these things we did here, he’s against,” Davis said of Simon as he pointed to the flier.

Among the verities proved once more this election season is the difficulty faced by first-time candidates running atop the ticket in California. Simon’s frequent campaign stumbles point up a lesson previously learned by wealthy businessmen Michael Huffington, Al Checchi, William Matson Roth and Norton Simon, among others, that “political experience counts,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior scholar at USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development. “Political instincts are important.”

While GOP strategists continued to publicly express their confidence in Simon, privately, their assessments were more somber. One concern was the effect a big loss might have on the rest of the statewide ticket -- and that contributed to Simon’s aggressive tone Saturday.

Surrounded by his ticket-mates, the GOP challenger spent much of his time on the attack. “Davis has not improved our schools,” Simon said. “He brags about his track record with our kids. But everybody knows that we’ve got 2 million kids trapped in our failing schools.”

Davis fails to recognize that California’s water and power systems are in “crisis,” Simon continued, and he predicted “the first thing he would do if he’s reelected is raise your taxes.”

The governor enters Tuesday’s election with both momentum and precedent on his side. But he remains a deeply unpopular figure across the state. Indeed, Davis has served this election season as a kind of all-purpose villain in Republican races up and down the ballot.

State Sen. Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz, the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, has broadcast a television ad suggesting he would serve as a brake on Davis in a second term -- even though he insisted Saturday he wasn’t writing Simon off.

“As part of our system of checks and balances, California’s lieutenant governor is independently elected,” McPherson, who is challenging incumbent Democrat Cruz Bustamante, reminded voters. “But it only works if the lieutenant governor speaks up when the governor is wrong. I won’t stay silent. I’ll speak up for California.”

Davis’ name has popped up in a bitter Assembly race in Contra Costa County, a neck-and-neck fight in the affluent East Bay suburbs that is perhaps the most hotly contested legislative race in California. “If you like Gray Davis, you’re going to love Donna Gerber,” said a GOP mailer for her Republican rival, Guy Houston.

The governor has even surfaced as a boogeyman in Irvine’s municipal elections, where Republican strategists have gone after the governor as a stand-in for Democrat Larry Agran, the incumbent mayor. “People identify with it immediately and understand the connection,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP consultant working on Irvine’s City Council races.

“Davis has become a symbol for incompetence and mismanagement that can be applied across the board.”

Beyond the state and local levels, the race for governor also carries implications in the next race for the White House, quietly underway now for months.

Davis has long been mentioned as a possible White House contestant -- the speculation comes with the job -- and the governor has done nothing to quell the talk. Even if Davis decides against running for president, as close advisors expect, he could still be a major irritant to President Bush. That is one of the reasons that national Republicans tried to soften Davis up last year with attack advertising launched even before his reelection effort began.

If he wins Tuesday, Davis is expected to sit down with advisors to consider whether to seek the White House, as three of his four predecessors have. But even if he is reelected handily, many in the Democratic Party dismiss Davis’ chances.

“Everybody believes his success in the campaign was due almost wholly to the ineptitude of his opponent, which doesn’t set him up for great things,” said one party strategist in Washington, who is close to several other possible presidential contestants.

For Republicans, yet another loss at the top of the ticket -- the fourth in successive statewide elections -- would hardly offer much encouragement for Bush, who, like his father eight years before, lost California in a landslide in 2000. Whatever happens Tuesday, “There’s going to need to be a healthy debate about the direction of the party [in California] and how to put together a winning coalition,” said Scott Reed, a veteran GOP strategist in Washington.

Already, the California governor’s race has enshrined one page in the political playbook: Davis’ brash intervention in the GOP primary served as a model in other states, with varying degrees of success.

By spending roughly $10 million on ads savaging the Republican front-runner, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, Davis helped Simon storm past Riordan in a major upset -- and handed the governor the opponent he much preferred to face.

Republicans tried a similar tack, meddling in Democratic primaries in Massachusetts and Florida, but the strategy didn’t work there. If anything, analysts say, the effort backfired in Florida, where attacks on Democrat Bill McBride actually elevated his status and helped push him past former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, the candidate incumbent Republican Jeb Bush would rather have run against on Tuesday.

The brother of the president is now locked in a stiff fight for reelection. But the failure of the pick-your-opponent strategy in Florida may simply speak to another of the verities of this election season: the importance of money.

Republicans “just didn’t spend enough” trying to take McBride out in the primary, said Lance dehaven-Smith, a Florida State University political scientist. Had the GOP spent a Davis-sized sum, Dehaven-Smith said, “absolutely it would have worked. No doubt about it.”

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Times staff writers Michael Finnegan and Matea Gold contributed to this report.