ShareThisThe past month has not been kind to Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.
The first hit came when her GOP rival Steve Poizner and labor unions went after her ties to the investment firm Goldman Sachs, just as federal investigators launched a criminal probe of the company.
Republicans around the country then started rallying around a controversial Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants, at the same time Poizner claimed the tough-on-immigration mantle in the race.
The toll the attacks have taken on Whitman's once-unbeatable candidacy became clear this week when the first major public poll to be released since March showed that Whitman's 50-point lead over Poizner among likely Republican primary voters had collapsed to just nine percentage points.
"Meg Whitman was a fresh candidate," said Thad Kousser, a University of California, San Diego, political science professor. "It's easy to fall in love with them, but it's easy to fall out of love with fresh candidates with every piece of new information you know about them."
The only clear winner of the Republican primary so far appears to be Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, who faces no major primary opponent and has barely spent any money on his campaign, Baldassare said.
The PPIC poll showed Brown leading Whitman by five points and Poizner by 13 points in a two-person general election matchup. The institute's March poll had put Brown behind Whitman by five points and ahead of Poizner by 15 points.
The latest poll was conducted by the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.
Its most telling number, said institute president Mark Baldassare, was the 31 percent of Republicans who remain undecided despite the record-shattering $100 million the two candidates have spent to get out their messages.
"It just speaks to the fact that the candidates have a lot of work ahead of them to be successful in June," Baldassare said.
Undecided Republican voter Jeanne Byrne of Grass Valley said she's been turned off by the barrage of negative advertising coming from both Poizner and Whitman.
"It's just really irritating," Byrne said. "I'd like to just have some honesty and some niceness instead of all this attacking."
Republican Irma Szurgot of Madera County said she became opposed to Whitman after reading a newspaper article about Whitman's business career and her purchase of special stocks offered to wealthy Goldman Sachs clients. The stock practice, known as IPO spinning, was later banned.
"I did hear she made a lot of money off of stocks that wasn't quite legitimate," Szurgot said.
Whitman, the billionaire former CEO of online auction firm eBay, has poured $68 million of her own wealth into her campaign, much of it for a paid advertising campaign that began in September.
The ads helped Whitman introduce herself to voters despite her lack of political experience, and pull far ahead of Poizner in public opinion polls.
Her spots slammed Poizner for helping fund a 2000 voter initiative making it easier to pass school bonds and for writing a check that same year to the campaign of then-Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore.
Poizner, also a former Silicon Valley CEO who's the current state insurance commissioner, started his ad effort in March.
He has attacked Whitman on multiple fronts, including her endorsement of Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2004, and her statement in October that she supported "a path to legalization" for illegal immigrants.
Having invested about $24 million of his own money in his campaign, Poizner recently jolted viewers with TV ads showing vultures circling and tearing apart a carcass, a reference to Whitman's more than $2 million investment in so-called Goldman Sachs vulture funds that invest in financially distressed companies. The ad implies, without basis, that Whitman benefited from mortgage failures.
"If Poizner can stay to her right and if the attacks about Goldman Sachs keep working, he's got a shot," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton.
Whitman spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said that Republicans will ultimately see Whitman as the real conservative running for governor.
"There will be a number of polls in this race, and we're confident that on election day, Californians will reject liberal Sacramento politicians and choose Meg because she's the only fiscal conservative running for governor," Pompei said.
Poizner spokeswoman Bettina Inclan predicted Whitman's lead would continue crumbling in the final weeks of the campaign.
"The poll just validates what we've been saying all along, that Meg Whitman's support was extremely soft and it was fueled just by her record spending," Inclan said. "There was no substance behind it."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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