ShareThisSAN FRANCISCO - The Republican woman who has the best chance to win in California on Nov. 2 is not billionaire Meg Whitman, who has spent more than $140 million of her own money to win.
It's Carly Fiorina, another former Silicon Valley CEO with thinner pockets but a looser campaign style who has drawn incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer into a dead heat.
The two Republican candidates have not campaigned together, but when they have appeared at the same event, Fiorina gets the attention -- pounding a shot of tequila and letting loose a rolled-r trill at the Hispanic awards dinner this month.
Even as Fiorina piggybacks on Whitman's high-tech ground operation to mobilize voters, her campaign is betting that she won't be sucked down with Whitman should the former eBay CEO lose the race for governor to Democrat Jerry Brown.
"The notion that somehow their fates are inextricably tied like they're some political Thelma and Louise is absurd," said Fiorina campaign manager Marty Wilson.
Fiorina was hospitalized Tuesday for treatment of an infection tied to reconstructive surgery after breast cancer. Her campaign said she hoped to be back on the hustings soon.
For the GOP, the Boxer seat is as much a trophy as that of endangered Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in neighboring Nevada. As influential as Reid is, Fiorina is considered a more substantive contender than Reid's opponent, Tea Party-backed Sharron Angle, and Boxer's three-decade stint in Washington as a liberal crusader has made her a GOP target.
A poll last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California showed Brown opening an eight-point lead over Whitman, up from a virtual tie in September. But Fiorina had edged to within five points of Boxer, with 13 percent of likely voters undecided. A Rasmussen poll late last week showed Fiorina closing to within three points, and leading by five among those who said they are certain to vote.
But a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California poll released Sunday showed Boxer holding an eight-point lead over Fiorina, who last week gave $1 million to her campaign, the first personal loan since the primary election in June. This week the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent Fiorina another $3 million, bringing the GOP's investment to nearly $8 million, the most the national party has ever spent on a California Senate race. The national Democratic Party has started to come to Boxer's aid.
Democrats often run away with statewide races because they have 2.3 million more registered voters than do Republicans. But this year, there are also 2.3 million Californians out of work. The news just keeps getting worse, with another 63,600 workers losing their jobs last month.
"Barbara Boxer has been on the Republican dartboard ever since landing in Washington," said Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney. "One of the biggest surprises in California is that Brown's lead is larger than Boxer's, which means that Fiorina could win narrowly, even if Whitman loses narrowly."
Pitney said voters are drawing distinctions between Whitman and Fiorina, including the fact that "Fiorina hasn't had an illegal alien problem," referring to Whitman's employment of an illegal housekeeper for nine years, whom she fired after the Mexican maid confessed that she lacked papers.
The White House is pouring everything it has into the Boxer campaign, sending President Obama to a private Palo Alto fundraiser and a huge Los Angeles rally for Boxer. Following on her husband's heels, Michelle Obama came to California this week with the aim of shoring up Boxer's base among women and African Americans.
Public Policy Institute President and CEO Mark Baldassare said voters are deeply unhappy with both Sacramento and Washington, but draw a distinction between the two very different jobs of governor and senator.
"You've got a Boxer-Fiorina race that revolves around how people are feeling about Congress, and you don't have that same dynamic in the Whitman-Brown race," Baldassare said. Aside from partisans, he said, "Independents are really the interesting issue. What do they want in Sacramento? And what do they want in Washington?"
This promises to be the toughest race in Boxer's career, perhaps closer than her first Senate race in 1992 against Republican Bruce Herschensohn, when Boxer is widely believed to have been helped by Democratic operative Bob Mulholland's revelation four days before the election that Herschensohn had visited a strip bar.
"It's close, as we always thought it was going to be," said Boxer campaign aide Matthew Kagan. "We're not taking any votes for granted, we're not writing off any groups, we're going after every vote."
Republicans think Brown -- despite his long political resume going back to the governorship in 1975 -- has effectively come off as an outsider. However, Boxer has deliberately run as a Washington insider, defending the unpopular stimulus and campaigning with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
In a state where Obama is still popular, that could work, Baldassare said.
"The highest approval that we're seeing when we ask about the governor, the state legislature, the Congress, is of the president," he said. "What people think about Congress and what people think about the president are two different things."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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