For his supporters, as a new poll by Knight-Ridder and NBC News suggests, accounts of Schwarzenegger's sexual misdeeds seem to have little sway. Women polled support Davis's recall 51 percent to 42 percent, and they favor Schwarzenegger to replace him. He received 35 percent support among the women compared with 29 percent for his nearest rival, Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.
If anything, women interviewed said, the sexual misconduct stories only made them angrier at Davis and Schwarzenegger's other opponents.
Lorraine Osborn, 49, a Sacramento computer engineer, felt that way, even though until this recall election, she was a lifelong Democrat -- "a really, really liberal Democrat at that."
"What changed my mind was all the tax increases," she said, "the tax on the car, and because we're so broke when we weren't broke before Davis."
As for the reports of Schwarzenegger's groping, inappropriate touching and language toward women, Osborn, like so many other Schwarzenegger supporters, shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. And, like so many others, she questioned the timing of the report, so close to the election. She wondered, as others did, why the women had not come forward at the time they were supposedly groped. And she brought up a favorite antidote to the accounts of Schwarzenegger's boorishness: his wife, Maria Shriver.
"Maria Shriver is no pushover," she said. "Arnold's wife is not the kind of woman who would just sit back and let her husband behave that way." Shriver, part of the nation's most famous family of Democrats, joined Schwarzenegger during his bus rally from San Diego to Sacramento, attracting her own share of adoring fans and requests for autographs along the way. In Modesto on Saturday afternoon, three young women admired Shriver's prominent cheekbones and declared afterward that they needed to diet. "Then maybe I'll get someone like Arnold," said Tiffany Lopez, 21, who "definitely, definitely" planned to vote for Schwarzenegger -- her first vote, ever. The women issue? "Not an issue at all," she said. "I'd let him grope me any time!"
Other women said much the same. Or they said that they were sure the women who accused Schwarzenegger of molesting them had instigated the incidents. Osborn, the computer engineer, said that she had seen Schwarzenegger on two occasions in Orange County many years ago, when he was Mr. Universe and her ex-husband, a body builder, had taken her to competitions. "The women were all over him," she said. "He didn't care about them; they wanted him."
Robin Tamas, 35, a registered nurse in Pleasanton, where she attended a Saturday afternoon rally for Schwarzenegger, said that her experience with women has taught her that they often flirt with men and then accuse them of misbehaving. "The allegations don't sway me at all," said Tamas, a registered Republican. "I'm very pro-woman. But unfortunately, because I work with women, I know how silly they can act."
The accounts were news to Nancy Liang, 52, a commercial insurance broker in Sacramento. The lifelong Republican said that she had not had time to focus on the details of the recall election.
"It's been hard to figure it all out," she said. "This has been such a confusing, fast election. Now, we're almost at election day and we get this dirt. Look at what President Clinton did, and everybody still loves him." She paused a moment. "Arnold didn't kill anybody. We're in a financial crisis, and he sounds like he could fix it." And that, she said, was that.
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