(3 of 4)
It's probably wishful thinking for Republicans to predict that Schwarzenegger can put the nation's largest state into the red column for Bush next year, but now they can dream a little. "I don't see how you can extrapolate much from this," says a Bush aide. "We're in uncharted territory out there." Some Republicans had even been rooting privately for Schwarzenegger to lose. "The best scenario I thought for Republicans going into this was the recall passes and Cruz Bustamante wins," confesses a top House G.O.P. aide. "Why? Because going into the '04 cycle, you can say to voters, 'Look, you've now had a second Democratic Governor try to tackle this thing, and they can't do it.'"
Although Washington Republicans stayed on the sidelines through the recall campaign, Schwarzenegger is keenly aware that they have an enormous stake in seeing him succeed. He declared the day after the election that he plans to be asking Bush for "a lot of favors." A failed Democratic Governor might have helped Bush in California, but a successful movie-star Republican Governor certainly can't hurt.
4 THE SWING VOTER LIVES!
It has become almost an article of faith among those who follow politics that the swing voter is vanishing. But if California voters elect a Democratic Governor and 11 months later turn him out for a Republican, might you not call that a swing?
California went for a Republican who sounds sort of like a Democrat, so it might follow that the best Democratic choice is one who sounds sort of like a Republican. That's what the campaigns of Joe Lieberman and John Kerry are suggesting, and that's the centrist premise that helped elect Clinton in 1992. "The swing voters turned out," says Mark Penn, pollster to Lieberman, the most conservative candidate in the increasingly left-leaning Democratic field. "They really can be motivated. They do care." But does it take a three-ring circus to bring them out?
The electorate looks polarized in part because politicians have protectively drawn legislative boundary lines to cut down the number of swing districts. California is an extreme case in what is a national trend. "You create districts where the only way an incumbent can lose an election is in a primary to an even more extreme opponent," says California G.O.P. strategist Dan Schnur. "You drive both parties into their respective corners." Witness the redistricting fight in Texas that sent Democratic legislators skedaddling across state lines twice this year. Texas Republicans last week unveiled a plan to create seven congressional seats for themselves--which is pretty much what they had in mind from the start. Another walkout could be in the works.
But the California election showed that if voters get mad enough and motivated enough, they'll cross lines too. And they will direct their anger not at an ideological enemy but at status-quo politics.
5 DON'T SNICKER