Recall Race Wraps Up in a Whirlwind

The tumultuous California recall race hurtles to a close today when millions of voters cast their ballots on whether to sweep Gray Davis from office and install a new governor to finish the remaining three years of his term.

Davis and leading contenders for his job raced across the state Monday beseeching supporters to turn out for the historic election -- the first statewide recall ever presented to California voters.

The Democratic governor, dashing from a Sacramento school forum to raucous labor rallies in San Francisco and Los Angeles, urged voters to give him credit for making progress on education, health care, the environment and jobs.

“I know that people are angry, and I’ve acknowledged making some mistakes, but we are working through these problems,” Davis said.

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose celebrity status has sparked worldwide media coverage of the race, campaigned in San Jose, Huntington Beach and San Bernardino.

“Do you want to go backward with Gray Davis or do you want to go forward with Arnold?” he told throngs of sign-waving supporters in a San Jose airplane hangar before heading to Southern California. “Those are the choices.”

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante adopted a novel technique for his last day on the stump: He posed for photographs with bystanders at Polaroid shops in Oakland and San Francisco. Earlier, at a United Farm Workers rally in East Los Angeles, Bustamante cast himself as a protector of gains achieved under Davis for immigrants, minorities and workers.

“We have just 36 hours to get out the vote -- are we going to do it?” the Democrat asked more than 100 cheering UFW volunteers at a Knights of Columbus hall. “We need to do it for our families. We need to do it for all those workers who are not being paid the proper wage. We need to do it for all those families who are not getting health-care benefits.”

The only major contender to stay put Monday was state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks). Dispensing with the traditions of rallies, crowd-waving and child-hugging, he planted himself at a Sacramento television studio, where he gave no fewer than 17 interviews, many of them beamed nationwide by satellite.

McClintock made a final plea to conservatives who might be inclined to vote for the moderate Schwarzenegger under the assumption that he is the only Republican who can win. McClintock portrayed himself as the candidate who is truest to conservative values.

“I suspect a lot of people have been sitting down these last few days sorting through their thoughts,” he said. “I say to them: Come on home.”

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Given the saturation news coverage of the recall campaign, election officials are bracing for a heavy turnout. More than 2.2 million of California’s 15 million registered voters have already voted by absentee ballot.

To avoid a morning and evening rush, elections officials are urging voters to go to the polls in the middle of the day if possible.

“Clearly it’s going to be more crowded, and there will be more lines,” said Conny McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. “It would be naive to assume anything else.”

Because of the unprecedented nature of the recall, state officials have not made their traditional preelection prediction of turnout. In the November governor’s race, 51% of registered voters cast ballots, a record low; in the 2000 presidential election, turnout was 71%.

For some elections officials, the compressed timetable of the recall was cause for concern. Counties had less than three months to prepare, considerably less time than usual.

Several counties, including Los Angeles, are opening far fewer polling stations than they do in normal November elections, a situation that Democrats and civil rights groups challenged unsuccessfully in court. Other counties, such as Orange, are using new optical scan voting machines for the first time.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and others have warned of possible complications at the polls, but hope that a voter education program, along with the intense media coverage, will minimize troubles.

“We’ve certainly done as much as humanly possible to prepare for this unique statewide election,” said Assistant Secretary of State Terri M. Carbaugh. “We are optimistic that we will be able to identify and respond quickly to any challenges that may arise.”

The ballot will offer a yes or no vote on whether Davis should be retained as governor. If a majority supports his recall, Davis will be ousted.

The second part of the recall vote is a menu of 135 candidates running to succeed the governor in case he is recalled. Voters can pick a successor regardless of whether they chose yes or no on the Davis recall.

The leading candidates -- Schwarzenegger, Bustamante and McClintock -- will appear in different sections of the candidate list, depending on the election district. Officials recommend that voters study their sample ballots before entering the voting booth.

Also on the ballot are Proposition 53, a measure that would set aside up to 3% of the state’s general-fund revenue for infrastructure projects, and Proposition 54, which would bar California from collecting or using most kinds of racial or ethnic data.

With turnout a crucial factor in the outcome of the race, party loyalists were trying to mobilize their base voters Monday. Thousands of Democrats have received No-on-the-Recall phone messages from Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barbra Streisand and the governor’s wife, Sharon Davis.

The California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, began calling 500,000 voters Monday, using 80 phone banks around California. The message: No on the Recall, Yes on Bustamante.

Volunteers are to place door hangers at homes of those voters this morning, call them later and, in some cases, knock on the doors of those who have not cast a ballot.

To contend with possible confusion at polling locations that have moved, the labor federation will post sentries at the old spots to redirect voters.

Los Angeles County labor chief Miguel Contreras said a recent slip in support for the recall, as measured in an assortment of private polls, has offered new hope that Davis can be saved.

“Is it enough to get people who were taking a look at Schwarzenegger to take a second look and turn the tide?” he asked. “We have seen some evidence of that, but we just don’t know if it will be enough.”

Mike Vallante, chief operating officer for the California GOP, said its volunteers would leave 250,000 Yes-on-the-Recall, Yes-on-Schwarzenegger hangers on doorknobs of registered Republicans in San Diego, Riverside, Sacramento and Fresno counties, among others. Volunteers will also call up to 1.5 million Republicans coaxing them to the polls, he said.

But unlike the typical party effort targeting the most reliable voters, the GOP is reaching out specifically to Republicans who have voted in just one -- or even none -- of the last four primaries.

“We’re going further down the chain, because our belief is that people are really energized by [the recall], and that they’re willing to get off the couch and do something about it,” Vallante said.

The election culminates an unlikely nine-month odyssey started by a small band of conservative activists weeks after Davis narrowly won reelection over Republican Bill Simon Jr.

Initially, seasoned strategists -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- dismissed the recall drive as a pipe dream. But Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), a wealthy Republican from the San Diego suburbs, put up the money to pay scores of parking-lot crews to gather signatures on the petition for a special recall election.

By July, the recall measure qualified for the ballot, thanks in no small part to voter fury over the state’s $38-billion budget shortfall.

To defeat the recall, Davis pleaded with fellow Democrats to stay out of the replacement contest so he could cast the election as a Republican power grab. Bustamante was the only Democrat holding statewide office to break his pledge not to run.

On the Republican side, Issa launched his campaign for governor, followed by Simon and McClintock. Issa and Simon dropped out after Schwarzenegger’s bombshell announcement on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” that he would run for governor.

With that appearance, Schwarzenegger transformed the campaign into a global media attraction, and for nine weeks, his presence has dominated the television coverage.

As the campaign wrapped up Monday, accusations by 15 women that Schwarzenegger groped or humiliated them remained a key focus of the race. Davis told reporters it was an insult to voters for Schwarzenegger to refuse to discuss the allegations in detail before the election.

“I think they have shown a lot of courage in coming forward against a very popular, very wealthy movie star, because some of these women had something to do with the movie business,” he said. “My heart goes out to them and their families for standing up to Mr. Schwarzenegger’s criticism.”

In San Francisco, Davis stayed on the offense at a Union Square rally, telling 3,000 cheering firefighters and other supporters that Schwarzenegger was “pulling the wool over your eyes.”

“He can’t produce a balanced budget,” said Davis, standing alongside Mayor Willie Brown Jr. “That’s why he says we’ll talk about this after the election. You may remember last night he said we’ll talk about a few other things after the election.”

More broadly, Davis accused Republicans of “trying to come to California and steal an election they lost fair and square.”

Schwarzenegger largely ignored the accusations Monday after four days of alternately describing them as dirty politics by the Davis campaign or apologizing for unspecified misconduct toward women.

Still, he opened his final day of campaigning with more than 50 women behind him on stage at the San Jose rally, many of them waving signs reading, “Remarkable Women for Arnold.” His wife, Maria Shriver, introduced him.

At a rally later in Huntington Beach, her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, joined them on stage with young men and women holding surfboards.

Schwarzenegger renewed his vows to clean up Sacramento and give California the strong leadership that he says the governor has failed to provide. He also echoed a longtime Davis promise to fight offshore oil drilling.

“We have to protect our coastlines and our beaches, simply because it’s part of California,” he said. “It’s the beauty of California and also the tourism relies on our beaches and coastlines.”

Bustamante, hoping to become California’s first Latino governor in more than a century, described himself Monday as a champion of gay rights, the environment and broader access to health care.

He also stressed his pledge to lend support to community colleges.

“There are 123,000 community college students who are not going to be going to college this year and that’s outrageous,” said Bustamante, who often talks about his own entry into higher education through a community college in Fresno. “We need to fix it now.”

Bustamante also warned that a Schwarzenegger victory would return former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson to power.

Wilson, a Schwarzenegger campaign co-chairman, angered many Latinos with his backing of Proposition 187, the 1994 measure that -- but for court intervention -- would have curtailed public services for illegal immigrants.

“I really do have deep concerns about his regaining some kind of authority over government,” said Bustamante.

McClintock, the underdog in the race, urged supporters to hand him “the greatest upset in state history.”

Calling himself the “anti-Arnold,” he argued over and over that if Californians choose the candidate they view as most qualified, he will win.

“My message is, it’s all right to vote your conscience,” he said on MSNBC. If voters do that, he said, “I’ll win by a landslide.”

Times staff writers Gregg Jones, Daryl Kelley, Scott Martelle, Peter Nicholas, James Rainey, Lee Romney and Joel Rubin contributed to this report.