Whitman-Brown in dead heat, new California poll shows

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After months of negative advertising fueled by more than $100 million in campaign spending, the California governor's race is the closest it's been this near the election in two decades.

Six weeks from Nov. 2, Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown are dead even in a new poll. Voters are increasingly negative about both of them, according to a nonpartisan Field Poll.

"This race is boiling down to a tough decision," said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. "More voters hold negative than positive impressions of the candidates, and that contributes to the situation."

Brown and Whitman each polled 41 percent of likely voters.

A governor's race hasn't been this close at this stage since 1990, when then-Sen. Pete Wilson and Democrat Dianne Feinstein were in a statistical tie in late August.

Whitman, the billionaire former CEO of online auction firm eBay, became the biggest self-funding candidate in U.S. history last week, investing more than $119 million of her own wealth in her campaign.

Brown began running paid advertising only after Labor Day, while Whitman has been running such spots for a year now. Several union-funded independent expenditure committees have run ads attacking Whitman since June.

Nearly a fifth of California voters remain undecided, including independent Roy Francis of Sacramento, who said he hasn't seen anything from either candidate or their TV commercials that's excited him this year. He said he was leaning toward Brown ever so slightly.

"It's just the lesser of two evils like it is 90 percent of time," said the retired maintenance worker. "I will not vote for Meg Whitman because all she's saying is deregulate, deregulate ... And I wish Brown had a few more ideas about what he's going to do."

The Field Poll, however, gave both Whitman and Brown news to celebrate.

Whitman leads Brown by three percentage points in giant Los Angeles County, where about a quarter of the state's registered voters live and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1. Democrats hold a 13.4 percentage point registration edge over Republicans statewide.

The only region in which Whitman trails Brown is in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to both candidates, where Brown has built a commanding 40-point lead.

Whitman has tied Brown among women, who usually lean Democratic in the state, and trails the Democrat by only three percentage points among Latinos, the poll found.

Whitman was also leading Brown by four percentage points among likely mail-in voters, a growing part of the state electorate.

While the Field Poll surveyed only about 100 Latino voters, the results suggest an unusually good showing for an ethnic group Republican candidates have struggled to win over, DiCamillo said. Whitman has invested heavily in advertising on the state's Spanish-speaking stations.

"The key to Arnold (Schwarzenegger's) path to victory is he did much better with Latinos than Republicans have in the past," said Thad Kousser, a University of California, San Diego political science professor. "If Meg Whitman can repeat that feat, this would give her a good shot."

Brown has won a battle of sorts just by staying even with Whitman, Kousser said, nothing that the Democratic attorney general has been significantly outspent in an election cycle that favors Republicans.

"Jerry Brown has more room to grow because he's just starting to introduce himself to California voters," Kousser said. "In a (Democratic)-leaning state, more of those voters are going to be receptive to his message."

The percentage of undecided voters in California actually grew since the last poll, from 13 percent in July to 18 percent this month. Both candidates' unfavorable ratings have hit their highest points in the current election cycle.

"You can see (Whitman's ads) are having their effect, because they're raising Brown's negatives," DiCamillo said. "But they're not propelling her image that much."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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