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As many had predicted, the new governor elect was swept into office by less than 20% of the elgible voters. The combination of typical, lackluster, off-year election participation that attracted only 43.1% of the elgible voters and a small army of candidates allows the new governor elect to enter office with considerably less than a mandate of the majority.

The unmentionable bloc Posted: November 5, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc. When Arnold Schwarzenegger captured half the vote in the 135-person California recall, pundits said he had found the lost key to Republican victory in a state the party has been losing for a decade. For Arnold had carried three in 10 Latino votes! A hard second look by UPI analyst Steve Sailer, however, shows this to be an urban myth. "Republicans performed strongly in the California recall," he writes, "because they did what Republicans must always do: earn lots of votes from that enormous but apparently unmentionable bloc...

<p>Ever since 1994, when California voters enacted Proposition 187 (a bill barring illegal immigrants from receiving many public services), leading Republicans around the country have shied away from saying anything critical about illegal immigration, viewing it as a political kiss of death.</p>

Recall Candidates: Some Perspective Two Weeks After the Campaign By LINDA RENAUD News Editor Of the three Palisadians who started out in the recall election, one said he'd never run again, another said he'd consider it, and the third dropped out less than three weeks into the race. While last year's gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, 52, hit the campaign trail running, he dropped out, apparently, after polls indicated that he was not even garnering double-digit support in the campaign. Simon then endorsed governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since it was too late to have his name removed from the ballot, Simon...

<p>He was former Gov. Pete Wilson's closest aide for 28 years and helped steady Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign after it got off to a faltering start.</p> <p>Bob White, 61, who served as the campaign's chief of staff, is now playing a vital role in shaping Schwarzenegger's administration. If White's name doesn't register with the public, it's by design.</p>

The California recall election and its surrounding hoopla may have confirmed the suspicions of some people in other parts of the country that Californians are crazy. But not all Californians are crazy - just the most affluent and highly educated ones. Although the state as a whole voted to remove the disastrous Governor Gray Davis from office by 55 percent to 45 percent, he received a solid majority of support in most of the upscale northern California coastal counties. In San Mateo County, where the average home costs more than half a million dollars and the environmentalists reign supreme, keeping...

<p>California Democratic Party officials announced Tuesday that the state's fastest-growing voting bloc -- independents -- will be allowed to cast ballots in the party's March 2 presidential primary. Voters who "decline to state" a party or who register as some political affiliation other than the seven recognized parties in California will be eligible to choose the Democratic nominee for president next year.</p>

Ah, the omnipresent poll. The media punditocracy is addicted to using polls to tell us what "the American people feel" (never think) about everything from a president's so-called approval rating, to how a candidate's chances stack up against others in a race, to our "feelings" about various policy and social issues. Although the public has absolutely no way to evaluate the vast majority of polls for accuracy, most of us simply accept them as incontrovertible indicators of truth. Why? The answer probably is because we're told that polls are "scientific" since they use statistical-type analysis, and most of us tend...

The LA Times thought it was doing its job when it revealed the sordid past of Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the public's response showed that they were not interested in the truth, writes Duncan Campbell Monday October 20, 2003The Guardian When the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story five days before the California gubernatorial election about six women who claimed that they had been groped by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it caused outrage. However, the outrage was directed not at the governor-to-be for his treatment of women but at the newspaper for daring to print the allegations, even though Schwarzenegger has acknowledged...

California's recall election was bad news for Democrats in more ways that one. Not only did Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger manage to take control of the statehouse, but both he and conservative Tom McClintock drew unprecedented support from key Democratic voting blocks. Nationwide, more than 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000. But two years later, according to a Zogby survey, 23 percent of black Californians backed a Republican in the recall race [17 percent for Arnold, 6 percent for McClintock.] Worse still for Dems, nearly 40 percent of Hispanics voted for either Arnold or McClintock, who garnered...

GOP officials don't like to talk about it, but they have become the dominant party. A FTER THE 1972 AND 1980 ELECTIONS, Republicans said political realignment across the country would soon make them the dominant party. It didn't happen. Now, despite highly favorable signs in the 2002 midterm elections and the California recall, Republicans fear a jinx. Realignment? they ask. What realignment? Matthew Dowd, President Bush's polling expert, notes heavy Republican turnout in 2002 and the recall, a splintering of the Democratic coalition, Republican gains among Latinos, and shrinking Democratic voter identification--all unmistakable signs of realignment. But he won't call...

October 17 - 23, 2003 Permanent War Dem boss ready for GOP 'bastards' by R. Scott Moxley The howls you heard saturday morning while driving through Buena Park? That was the sound of 50 Democratic activists meeting at a nearby AFL-CIO hall days after staggering Republican victories over Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante.The meeting began, as California Democratic summits do, with complaints about conservative control of the media, stale coffee (with instant creamer), fond talk of Adlai Stevenson and infighting. One woman worried that union domination made it hard for the party to reach new voters....

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<p>The recall election that gave rise to Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger held Californians' attention as few news events have the power to do, according to a new survey, reigniting a disengaged electorate's interest in politics. As Schwarzenegger enters office for the first time, the results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California suggest the 56-year-old Republican movie star may well find voters responsive to his campaign promise to take priorities before them through the initiative process if he can't make headway with a divided Legislature.</p>

The Democratic spinners have been busy trying to put the best face possible on the landslide recall of Gray Davis and the impressive election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, but it's tough going. Maybe, they suggest, American voters are angry at all chief executives facing big budget deficits – in which case they may be ready to "recall" President Bush in 2004. And anyway, Schwarzenegger is far from being a typical Republican: He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-gun control. Save for the governorship, California is still solidly in Democratic hands: They control both houses of the legislature, hold both...

You gotta admire the way the media stayed on the Democrats' sinking California ship right to the very end. On the CNN website, even after Gray Davis had conceded, they were sticking to the loser's talking-points: "Schwarzenegger, who, like Hitler, is a native of Austria..." CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz...

The press relied heavily on exit-poll results in analyzing the results of the California recall election. That exercise left some analysts, including me, a little confused because the two major exit polls didn’t always agree. Even as exit polling tried to recover from its Voter News Service (VNS) 2002 blotto hangover, there are reasons to remain suspicious of this genre of polling. First, it should be noted that since the polls are based on huge samples, the theoretical margin of sampling error for them should be quite small. The Edison Media Research poll, directed by longtime exit pollster Warren Mitofsky...

by Michael Barone Governor Arnold 10/16/03 The recall Of California Gov. Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to succeed him is, first of all, a repudiation of left-wing Democratic governance. A state that Al Gore carried 53 percent to 42 percent voted 55 percent to 45 percent to recall Davis. Schwarzenegger got more votes than "no" on recall and more votes than Davis did in 2002. Davis was first elected in 1998 on competence and as a centrist. But his mishandling of the electricity crisis called into question his competence, and his big budget deficits — caused by...

Desperate Dems no match for Arnie October 12, 2003 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST You gotta admire the way the media stayed on the Demo-crats' sinking California ship right to the very end. On the CNN Web site, even after Gray Davis had conceded, they were sticking to the loser's talking-points: ''Schwarzenegger, who, like Hitler, is a native of Austria . . .'' CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now...

Democrats Drop the Lunch Pail By E.J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, October 14, 2003; Page A23 [...]But here's the secret of the Democratic primaries: They are no longer dominated by millworkers and milkmen. Steadily, the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the educated upper middle class.Just look at last week's recall vote in California: The strongest opposition to tossing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis from office came from voters with postgraduate degrees. (Davis also appeared to do reasonably well among voters who did not graduate from high school -- part of the Democratic base that pollster Andy Kohut calls "the partisan...