6 Candidates Coming Into Sharp Focus

With California’s gubernatorial recall election seven weeks away, the top protagonists, Gov. Gray Davis and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, face key tests this week as they race to build support among voters.

The Democratic governor hopes a major speech on the recall that he plans to give today at UCLA could reverse his political slide. Davis will lay out his most forceful and detailed arguments to date on why voters should keep him in office. His main goal is to erode support for the recall among rank-and-file Democrats.

Strategists say Davis also needs to shift the focus away from the race among the 135 candidates seeking to replace him, and back to the yes-or-no referendum on whether to kick him out of office.

“He’s lost that in the past week, and anything he can do to bring it back there helps him,” said Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman.

On the Republican side, Schwarzenegger will try to bolster his standing as the GOP front-runner, mainly by launching a statewide television ad campaign Wednesday. The film star’s ads will hit the air amid mounting attacks by rivals who accuse him of refusing to say how he would confront the state’s problems.

The jockeying by Davis and Schwarzenegger is the most visible part of what has evolved into a sharply defined contest -- in some ways even a traditional one -- among half a dozen serious candidates.

Davis is the only one who needs a majority vote. The first part of the ballot is a yes or no question on whether to bounce him from office.

The second part of the ballot will list Schwarzenegger and 134 other candidates seeking to replace Davis. Davis cannot run in the replacement race. If he is tossed out of office, the winner would become governor, even if that candidate gets fewer votes than Davis.

A key problem for Davis is the presence of a fellow Democrat, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, on the replacement ballot.

For months, Davis urged fellow Democrats to stay off the ballot under the assumption that it would be easier for him to beat the recall if the only alternative was a Republican.

But Bustamante broke his pledge to stay off the ballot. He now urges Californians to vote no on the recall, but yes on Bustamante to ensure that the state’s governor remains a Democrat regardless of whether Davis wins on the first question.

Now, however, Davis faces polls showing a solid majority of Californians support the recall. Those polls are increasing pressure on unions and other Democratic constituency groups to back Bustamante’s campaign against the governor’s wishes.

Most immediately, Davis is locked in a fierce competition with Bustamante for campaign money. Both are turning to the same pool of contributors as they scramble for donations to pay for television advertising.

“There’s not that much money to go around,” said state Democratic Chairman Art Torres.

With 49 days until the Oct. 7 special election, Davis and Bustamante are quickly running out of time to raise the millions of dollars that would take months or years to collect in a normal campaign. The task is especially hard when Democratic presidential candidates are simultaneously sweeping up money from California donors like “Hoover vacuum cleaners,” Torres said

Bustamante strategist Richard Ross said Davis advisors have leaned on potential donors to deny support to the lieutenant governor.

“It’s political greed gone berserk,” Ross said.

Davis advisor Garry South called the accusation a flat-out lie.

Still, Bustamante’s efforts to gain support have begun to bear fruit. The biggest union of state workers, the California State Employees Assn., announced Monday that it was not just opposing the recall of Davis, but also endorsing Bustamante. Other unions could follow suit within days.

For Bustamante, the overall task ahead is less daunting than it is for Davis. While Davis must win more than 50% of the vote on the up-or-down question on the recall, Bustamante only needs to gain a larger share than the other 134 candidates on the replacement ballot.

Bustamante’s candidacy -- and his lead in a recent Field Poll -- has also had repercussions on the Republican side. With GOP support divided between four major candidates, some Republicans fear that Bustamante could emerge as the winner, shattering their party’s hope of using the recall to reverse years of losses in statewide elections.

“What I want is for them to all show some leadership, by getting together and deciding which candidate among themselves has the best chance to win this recall, and then everybody get on board,” said Rick Veldstra, chairman of the San Joaquin County Republican Committee.

The other major Republican candidates are state Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks, Bill Simon Jr., a businessman from Pacific Palisades, and Peter V. Ueberroth, the former baseball commissioner who ran the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

For now, though, no Republican appears ready to drop out of the race. Indeed, McClintock, Simon and Ueberroth are each hoping to find a way to outmaneuver Schwarzenegger despite the actor’s tremendous advantages in money and name recognition.

Some strategists see Ueberroth, who will launch his campaign Wednesday, as the biggest threat to Schwarzenegger.

Ueberroth plans to strike a sober, businesslike tone that he hopes will contrast with the Hollywood glitz of Schwarzenegger’s campaign.

McClintock and Simon, both vying for backing from their party’s conservative base, have questioned whether Schwarzenegger, a moderate, is true to Republican principles.

“Democrats are having their battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, and we’re having our battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Simon strategist Wayne Johnson said.

“The real question is whether or not Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to come out from behind the curtain and become a real Republican. Real Republicans don’t raise taxes,” Johnson said.

Schwarzenegger has declined to say whether he is open to raising taxes to close the state’s projected budget gap of at least $8 billion next year.

But after his economic advisor Warren Buffett said last week that many Californians pay too little in property taxes, Schwarzenegger released a statement affirming his support for Proposition 13. The 1978 ballot measure capped property tax increases.

Schwarzenegger strategist George Gorton dismissed the actor’s political critics as peashooters.

“It sounds like the carping of little people with little ideas who are trying to do the same sort of little campaigns they have run all their lives,” he said.

A large unknown factor as the election looms is something that traditional polling is ill-equipped to measure: the impact of the remaining 130 candidates on the leading contenders.

“Who do they take votes from?” said South, who ran Davis’ first two gubernatorial campaigns. “That is the biggest wild card of all.”

Mark Baldassare, pollster at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, said the national media’s portrayal of the recall race as a circus conflicts with the actual circumstances.

A more apt comparison, he said, would be the state’s primary elections of 1998 and 2000.

In those elections, Californians were allowed to vote in any party’s primary.

Over the years, he added, Californians have grown accustomed to sorting through cluttered ballots.

“Many people have heard more about this issue than they heard about the governor’s race last time,” Baldassare said. “So they’re not going to be surprised by anything they see.”

Times staff writers Gregg Jones and Joe Mathews contributed to this report.