The first meaningful California presidential primary campaign in decades swirled to a close with a final round of candidate appeals, advertisements, mailers and door-knocking -- and a boatload of uncertainty over exactly when the outcome will be decided.
On the final weekend before election day, Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were locked in a tumultuous battle for the 370 California delegates at stake Tuesday, while Republican John McCain had his eye on 170 Republican delegates as he sought to dispatch Mitt Romney.
When the candidates were not parading through the state, their surrogates were. As Hillary Clinton campaigned in Inglewood and at Cal State L.A., the 2004 party nominee, John Kerry, stumped for Obama in Northern California. Today, in an only-in-Hollywood turn, former President Clinton and Obama backers Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy will highlight events in Los Angeles.
It was not simply a statewide battle. With two dozen states voting Tuesday, California's race was defining and, in turn, being shaped by the contests outside its borders. And since the delegates will be apportioned according to results in each congressional district -- not in a statewide popularity contest -- the campaigns were breaking into dozens of mini-contests across California.
And that did not count the other contested matters on the ballot. Four measures, which have dominated the airwaves for weeks, would let stand compacts approved by the governor and Legislature that permit select Indian tribes to expand their casinos. Another would reorder term limits, and another would change community colleges' funding.
But there was an awkward side effect to the scrappy campaign: Up to 20% of the votes could remain uncounted on election day, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
Bowen declined to estimate what proportion of voters would turn out Tuesday. She cited several reasons, among them the early date of the primary and the heated contests in both major parties that have drawn historic turnouts in every state that has cast ballots already.
"I would be taking such a wild guess," she said.
The vote-counting was expected to be slowed by several factors. First, the sheer number of all voters has grown dramatically in the weeks before the election.
All told, 700,000 more Californians are registered to vote now than before the 2004 presidential primary, Bowen said Friday. Included in that total were more than 244,000 voters who signed up in the 45 days before the Jan. 22 registration deadline -- as the presidential race was heating up.
