With last week's certification of a gubernatorial recall election, California embarked on a crash campaign with few precedents.
But while the novelty of the election has left political experts unsure of what to expect, many predict that three aspects of the race will set its parameters: the rapid-fire nature of the 10-week race; the possible entrance of movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger; and the presence on the same ballot of the Racial Privacy Initiative, a measure to prevent the government from collecting racial data.
A gubernatorial recall has so many unknowns that political consultants of both parties -- who usually cleave close to conventional wisdom -- can't agree on even the very basics of proper strategy for a contest.
Some say money and fame are sure to determine the contest; others say the limited time frame and extensive news coverage will dilute the power of the pocketbooks. Some see the recall as a contest for independent voters; others say it will be a contest between whether Davis and Republicans over who can turn out their most liberal and conservative bases.
What political observers do agree on is that the recall election is a strange hybrid: an initiative campaign (shall the governor be recalled?) attached to a Republican primary with a twist -- the candidates may be moderates or conservatives, but many of the voters will be liberals.
"This is a very complex, very sophisticated campaign with a huge number of variables," said Clint Reilly, who has been a strategist both for the Republican former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat. "It's hard to know what to think."
Provisions for recall elections are set out in the state Constitution. Once the secretary of state certified Wednesday that enough voters had signed petitions demanding a recall, an election was ordained to occur 60 to 80 days hence.
The job of picking the precise date fell to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who on Thursday chose Oct. 7, a date 77 days from the certification. The usual time to prepare for a state election is 131 days, though most candidates plan their campaigns for much longer than that.
Two months is an uncomfortable length of time, consultants say -- too short to build a statewide political organization to turn out voters but too long for most candidates to run a sustained television campaign in such a large state.
