New Voters Are Calif. Recall's Great Unknown
By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 5, 2003; Page A06
LOS ANGELES -- Only 948 new voters registered in California's San Bernardino County in June, which was not surprising because this was not supposed to be a major election year in the state. But the next month, when California's historic gubernatorial recall election had become a political reality, the number of new voters swelled by 12,323.
In August, in Santa Clara County, 6,487 more people registered to vote than had registered in August 2002, shortly before the November election in which Gov. Gray Davis (D) was reelected to a second term.
Who are these people?
They could be Democrats angry at the Republican-inspired drive to recall Davis from office. They could be conservative Republicans who want to boost the candidacy of conservative GOP state Sen. Tom McClintock to be the successor of Davis if he is ousted.
They could be Hispanics excited by the possibility of electing California's first Hispanic governor, Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, the only prominent Democrat on the second part of the ballot. Or they could be fans of movie actor and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger who are equally excited about the prospect of having "The Terminator" in the governor's mansion.
In fact, no one knows who the newly registered voters are or what motivates them. Nor can the campaigns know who will actually turn out Tuesday and how large their numbers will be. But based on the level of interest in the recall election, most officials expect a turnout that will equal and perhaps exceed the 7.7 million people who voted in November's general election. A turnout approaching the 11.1 million Californians who voted in the 2000 presidential election is not out of the question.
"Week after week, we are definitely seeing an increase in registration," said Angel Burrell, a spokeswoman for the Orange County registrar of voters. "We compare it to most presidential elections."
In a final report on voter registration for the recall election issued Friday, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley (D) said that 15.3 million Californians are registered to vote, an increase of more than 388,000 since early August. The surge in registration means that there are more Californians registered to vote in the recall election than there were in each of the past three presidential elections.
In another indication of the intense interest in this election, Shelley's office said that almost 1.7 million absentee ballots had been returned by Friday morning, approaching the slightly more than 2 million absentee ballots cast in the 2002 gubernatorial election. County voting registrars mailed out more than 3 million absentee ballots for the recall election.
With polls still consistently showing that a majority of likely voters favor Davis's recall, the prospect of an unusually high turnout provides some small comfort to the allies of the embattled incumbent. California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres argues that a large turnout in this Democratic state improves the chances that Davis will survive the recall effort.
"A low turnout usually involves people who are motivated to vote against something," he said.
But the most recent nonpartisan Field Poll also contained a warning about turnout for Davis. It showed that 57 percent of likely voters favored ousting Davis from office, about the same as the 56 percent who favored the recall in a Los Angeles Times poll published this past week. The Field Poll also found that among people who did not vote in 2002 or who voted for a minor party candidate -- in other words, other than Davis or Republican nominee Bill Simon -- support for the recall stood at 70 percent.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said that as the likely electorate has grown to include more new voters, especially younger people, Davis's chances of survival have diminished.
The biggest unknown factor is Schwarzenegger, a celebrity who is making his first run for public office and who is now the clear front-runner to succeed Davis if the recall succeeds.
The thrust of the Schwarzenegger campaign has been to portray him as a political outsider who is free of the "special interests" in Sacramento. Schwarzenegger has made few specific proposals but has promised to "open up the books" in Sacramento to find out why the state government is in such deep fiscal trouble.
The successful model for such an insurgent, outsider campaign is former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, who shocked pollsters and political analysts when he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. But Ventura enjoyed a key advantage that Schwarzenegger will not. Minnesota allows Election Day registration, and in 1998 more than 332,000 newcomers -- many of them Ventura supporters -- showed up at the polls to vote. That exceeded the number of Election Day registrants in the two previous gubernatorial elections by more than 100,000.
Registration for the California recall election ended on Sept. 22. That was two days before the only televised debate in which Schwarzenegger participated, which seemed to boost his candidacy, but also before the Los Angeles Times published a report Thursday in which six women accused Schwarzenegger of sexually harassing and groping them.
"There cannot be any kind of mania right before the election," DiCamillo said. "You have to be deliberate, and you have to be registered."
DiCamillo said that over the course of five polls, the makeup of the likely recall electorate has been changing "in small but important ways." Likely voters overall have become younger, he said, and more of them are Hispanic. So, too, are voters who are not registered with either major party, a segment of the electorate that has helped to propel Schwarzenegger to the front of the pack in the polls.
According to this week's Los Angeles Times poll, Schwarzenegger's support among independent voters has swelled from 14 percent in early September to 44 percent now.
Mike Murphy, a Washington-based Republican consultant who is working for Schwarzenegger, said the actor "is not going to bet the whole ranch" on attracting new voters, but that they could form an important part of his support.
"We think that to the extent people are excited, they're excited about us," Murphy said. "His celebrity has created an excitement in the race that is pulling in people who haven't voted before."
But will the newly excited actually vote? "Arnold's base is disaffected voters who are tired of both political parties, but it's hard to see them turning out to vote," Torres said. "His strongest appeal is to young people, who are the least likely to vote."
Phil Trounstine, a former communications director for Davis who now heads the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University, said that he still expects the recall electorate to be dominated by regular voters, which could hurt Davis because "it's an older, wealthier crowd that [regularly] votes."
"Conservatives are registered already," he said. "The big unknown is whether 'Terminator 3' fans become registered voters. . . . Who shows up is what really matters. The shape of this electorate will determine the whole outcome. There's very little margin for error."
The campaigns will also have less control than usual over the size and shape of the electorate, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonpartisan voter education organization. In recent years, she said, California politicians have engaged in "voter profiling," targeting specific slices of the electorate and hoping that the others will not vote.
"There is an excitement about this election unlike anything I've seen in California," she said. "What's different is that, in the past, the campaigns have been able to control who shows up. In this election, they won't be able to control that. That's a real wild card."
Special correspondent Kimberly Edds contributed to this report.
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