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The recall vote: It's a sprint to Oct. 7 Days into this unprecedented campaign -- and still unsure of the field -- interested parties are throwing together the sorts of detailed strategies that ordinarily take months to evolve. They have little to guide them aside from polling data that show public support for a recall at an up-in-the-air 51 percent. Davis is drawing on California voters' liberal-to-moderate tilt, minimal understanding of state finances and fear of political chaos in already uncertain times. With Democratic leaders uniting behind him, the governor is painting the recall as a right-wing conspiracy. Registered Democrats in the state outnumber Republicans 44 percent to 35 percent. About one in four Democratic voters supports the recall. Davis' advisers tell him all he needs to do to hang on to his job is bring a few of those partisans back into the fold and get them to the polls. In nearly all of his public remarks, Davis also has noted that a special election will cost at least $30 million; his pollsters learned that voters are appalled by that figure, even though, under the Davis administration's $38.2 billion state budget shortfall, that's about what the government has been overspending every day or two. "Gray's already sat down with his consultants," said the governor's wife, Sharon Davis, in an interview Wednesday just hours before the election was certified. "Any initiative that starts with only 50 percent of support nearly always fails, because you've already gotten to the people who kind of like the idea. But now they start hearing some of the negatives: 'This is completely driven by Republicans.' 'This is driven by a right-wing conservative.' 'This is going to cost the taxpayers $30 million. ... Oh, and by the way, if enough people get in the race, a governor may get elected with only 10 percent or 12 percent of the vote.' "When you tell people that, they're much less likely to support the recall, especially Democrats and independents. With that, we come in from a rather strong position." Finally, Davis' team intends to shift the focus from a fiscal mess that seemed to explode after the governor's re-election last year to a referendum on President Bush's first term. This strategy comes as the 2004 presidential race heats up and as Bush's once-stellar approval ratings slip under the strain of national economic problems. "George Bush is already weaker in this state than most of the country," said Davis pollster Paul Maslin. "We're not trying to absolve the governor of all responsibility here. What we're trying to say is there are other pieces of this, most particularly including the national policies coming from a Republican administration." The anti-Bush strategy also aims to rally national Democratic activists and presidential candidates to Davis' side in the coming months. For recall advocates, the plan is more straightforward: Blame Davis for government overspending, higher taxes, job losses, failures of public schools, clogged highways, the energy crisis of 2001 and anything else driving voter dissatisfaction. "As long as people see this as an expression of their outrage and upset over the increase in spending and their increase in taxes, it's going to be damn hard to beat," said George Gorton, a Republican consultant advising movie star and potential Davis challenger Arnold Schwarzenegger. Comparing the recall with California's landmark property tax reduction initiative in 1978, Gorton said, "This is like Proposition 13. There's nothing that can stop it."
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley certified the recall election last week, announcing
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