BILL, MEET HILLARY :

Bill Simon's Winning Numbers (George Neumayr, 5/2/02, American Prowler)

"I don't want to argue on whether or not Gray Davis has done a good job or a bad job. I just want to look at the numbers. And the numbers say he has done a terrible job. His numbers stink," said pollster Stuart Rothenberg in April. "And he's losing to a guy who has never run for office before on a ballot test."

A survey conducted by the California Teachers Association -- a group which endorsed Davis -- found Bill Simon enjoying a four-point lead over Davis, 41 to 37 percent.

Simon says that he has been maintaining an 8-point lead over Davis since the primary. The polling firm Public Opinion Strategies Inc. says Simon leads Gray Davis 48% to 41% among registered voters. A poll conducted by Probolsky & Associates Opinion Research puts Davis's support at less than 38% of voters and Simon's at 44%.

Polls apparently don't impress the California media unless they show Davis ahead. The San Francisco Chronicle neglected the polls above, but it quickly perked up when an unreliable Field Poll emerged to suggest a Davis lead.

This Field Poll was not restricted to likely voters. And yet even this dubious poll bodes ill for Davis, as 57% of voters indicated they would not vote for his re-election.

It was only about ten years ago that we used to speak of the GOP's electoral lock on the White House. In the Reagan era, Republicans could rely on carrying the South, the Southwest, the Plains, and, most importantly, California. Democrats, if they had a decent candidate, could count on the Northeast, Northwest, and Hawaii, and be competitive throughout the Midwest, but without California they had to run the table and pick up some borderline Southern states in order to have a shot at winning (which is why their only successful candidates were Southerners : Carter & Clinton). Carter lost California to even as weak a Republican candidate as Gerald Ford, but Clinton broke through in 1992 and subsequent gubernatorial and senatorial elections showed how Democratic the state had become. Then in 2000, despite a massive effort by George W. Bush to keep the state at least competitive, he got buried (lost by 1.3 million votes). It now seems fair to say--with a Democrat governor and legislature, two Democrat Senators and three successive votes for fairly weak Democrat presidential candidates--that California is a strongly Democrat state.

There are several reasons for this shift, mainly having to do with Californians having significantly more permissive social views than the Republican Party and with the GOP's foolish alienation of Mexican voters during Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant initiatives. The first problem can not be changed by the GOP, but may well be changed by the continued demographic shifts in California, and so by healing the second breach, Republicans could become competitive there again. Hispanics, who, although they may be more dependent on government services than the average Republican voter are also mostly Christian conservatives, are a natural constituency for the GOP, if only they can be convinced that the Republican Party is not racist. This is probably a process that will require several years and will depend on George W. Bush and his successor to make tremendous and visible efforts to woo the Latino vote in 2004 and 2008 (Bush's first Supreme Court nominee will certainly be Hispanic and look for someone like Condi Rice to be his running mate in '04--she's not Latino but she's from CA and both a woman and a racial minority). For the moment, it seems safe to say that California's Hispanic vote and with it California, is a lost cause for the GOP.

What this means for 2002 is that despite Gray Davis's unpopularity, he is going to be re-elected governor. Sure an incumbent who can't get to 50% in the polls has to be considered to be in deep trouble, but like Hillary Clinton in 2000, we'd have to expect that disaffected Democrats will drift back to the party nominee over the course of the Summer, even if they aren't enthusiastic about doing so. By early Fall, we'd expect to see Davis around 55%, which is still trouble, but, barring a national Republican tidal wave, like that of 1980 or 1994, that should be enough to get him through to victory.

Republicans have taken heart in the numbers that Bill Simon has posted so far, with most polls showing him ahead and all showing him to be polling in the 40s. Keep in mind though that he starts with at least 40% (any major party candidate does in almost every state) and the rest is probably just an inchoate anti-Davis sentiment. In fact, I can't find the specific numbers on-line, but I suspect Simon is actually polling higher than his name recognition numbers. This means that it remains for him to be defined in the minds of voters, and we all know how Davis and his allies in the media will define him : a rich, racist, anti-abortion, whacko. For Democrats, Davis will quickly become the better of two bad alternatives and Simon will likely even lose ground with Republican women. We saw much the same thing happen between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio in New York and there seems no reason to believe things will be different in California this Fall.

I'd like nothing better than to be wrong about this, but the whole thing looks like Hillary redux to me.

UPDATE :
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' :
California Would Re-elect Bush, Poll Shows (NewsMax, May 4, 2002)

He may have lost California by a whopping 1.3 million votes in 2000, but George Bush would now win the state with 52 percent of the vote, a new poll shows.

Moreover, according to the non-partisan Field Poll Bush would defeat Al Gore - the man who took California handily in the 2000 election, with Bush now getting 48 percent to 41 percent for Gore.

Writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, reporter John Marelius reported that when asked how inclined they were to vote for the president's re-election in 2004, 52 percent of voters said they were inclined to vote for Bush, compared with 42 percent who said they were not. The remaining 6 percent had no opinion.

A huge 87 percent of Republicans said they are overwhelmingly inclined to re-elect Bush, and a surprising 26 percent of Democrats said they would vote for him as well. Only among independents and members of minor political parties did Bush lag, with 43 percent inclined to vote for him and a hefty 51 percent turning thumbs down on the president.

Among Latinos, a group Bush lost in 2000, a solid majority of 58 percent told the Field Poll they were inclined to support Bush's re-election this time. Among other minority groups, however, 77 percent of African-American voters said they were not inclined to vote for the president, as did 50 percent of Asian-Americans.

These are the kinds of inroads that George W. Bush needs to make with Latinos and if these numbers are real would actually give the GOP reason to believe that it can turn its fortunes around in CA. For now it's just one poll--and it's "registered voters" rather than the more meaningful "likely voters"--but it sure looks encouraging.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2002 7:51 AM