In California, White Men Are the Silent Plurality
By PETER SCHRAG - New York Times week in review
OAKLAND, Calif. -- From the beginning of California's unpredictable recall election, Arnold Schwarzenegger has tried to separate his moderate politics from his "Terminator" screen persona.
His R-rated movies and X-rated personal history are causing him particular problems with women voters, his support for abortion rights and after-school programs notwithstanding.
But for every problem, there may be a political strategy. Mr. Schwarzenegger's could lie in the sudden emergence of illegal immigration as an issue in the California campaign.
Although he is himself an immigrant, his core box-office constituency — young males — may not look kindly on Gov. Gray Davis's recent decision to sign a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.
With Californians facing a shrinking number of high-paying blue-collar jobs, a huge state deficit and reduced access to the state colleges, the immigration issue has never gone away, even if mainstream politicians avoided talking about it. But when Governor Davis, trolling for Latino votes, signed the driver's license bill, he put the issue on the political front burner.
Mr. Davis vetoed the bill last year, because, he said, it lacked safeguards to stop criminals from changing their identities. This time, he said, the law had more safeguards. But his shift reinforced the widespread view that he's an unprincipled opportunist. According to a poll released last week, Californians oppose the new law by 59 percent to 34 percent.
California Republicans have been reluctant to tackle the immigration issue head on; they still have not recovered from the fallout of Proposition 187, passed in 1994, which sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants and their children.
Pete Wilson, the Republican governor, used the initiative to help his own successful re-election campaign, running commercials showing shadowy figures running across a road with the refrain "They just keep coming." But the measure was overturned by a federal court, and it helped bring a million new Latinos to the voter rolls, nearly all as Democrats. Immigration became an issue relegated to radio talk shows, which were the only forums impolitic enough to allow residents to argue that California wouldn't be suffering its severe budgetary problems if it weren't for "all those Mexicans."
Today, the state's conservative Republicans are not shrinking from the issue. Tom McClintock, a state senator and the only other major Republican in the race, has vowed to seek a referendum overturning the driver's license law.
And Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the leading Democratic candidate in the race, has been explicitly appealing to Latino voters by lauding the contributions of immigrants, legal and illegal. He has also tried to link Mr. Schwarzenegger with Proposition 187 and Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Schwarzenegger tries to walk a politically safer path. He is against the driver's license law, but approves of a policy allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition for California universities. He says that he voted for Proposition 187, but is against it now. At campaign appearances, he often says he supports immigrants "who do it the right way" — those who enter legally, work hard and pay taxes.
Such a stance may not rile the opposition — some of his publicists even boast that he is a favorite of young Latino men — but it may be enough to cement support among white male voters. In polls, Mr. Bustamante has the edge over Mr. Schwarzenegger among all female voters: 35 percent to 22 percent. But according to a survey last week by the Field Poll, a nonpartisan group, Mr. Bustamante is losing the men's vote, by 29 percent to 26 percent, with 16 percent favoring Mr. McClintock, who has been under intense pressure from Republican leaders to drop out.
Could the immigration issue lure men to the polls? Young men "are the hardest group to drag into the voting booth," said Ken Khachigian, a Republican campaign strategist.
And as pollsters point out, the California election is not like Minnesota's in 1998, when rebellious male voters came out to vote for Jesse Ventura, giving him the 37 percent plurality he needed to win.
In July, a Field poll found that 54 percent of registered voters who firmly stated they intended to vote were women. In the September poll, those numbers started to favor men, 52 percent to 48 percent. The poll also found that the proportion of voters in the 18-39 age group had increased from 24 percent in July to 33 percent now.
Because of the extraordinary nature of this election, all predictions are risky. Yet even Governor Davis's pollster, Paul Maslin, acknowledged that young men supporting Mr. Schwarzenegger could make some difference.
Although fewer than half of all Californians are non-Hispanic whites, they make up 70 percent of the voters. And Californians, besides expressing their opposition in 1994 to services for illegal aliens, also voted against affirmative action in 1996 and against bilingual education in 1998.
The issue of illegal immigration, then, may be a pivotal one for Mr. Schwarzenegger, and create a volatile chemistry that goes well beyond this election.
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