I suspect he'll end up with about 37% or 38%, and Newsom 62% or 63%. The bigger question is how popular Newsom will be? Sometimes I believe he may have popular start and then become Gray Davis 2.0. But it's just a feeling, not evidence based.
I went to one of his speeches a few weeks back and one of my friends asked him about the budget. Newsom said that he supported a balanced budget (and pointed to his record in SF), but noted that he thought that he might have to deal with a recession as opposed to Brown, who has had a booming economy for most of his second stint.
The same essentially happend to Gray Davis. He came into office in 1999 after a landslide victory during the new economy and invested in education while leaving some surplus in the treasury. By 2001 things began to worsen due to an economic downturn and the electricity crisis and he was running record deficits. After his narrow reelection in 2002, as we know, he got thrown out of office in the recall. But Arnie didn't really solve the budget problem, Brown straightened it out.
Yeah but the energy crisis was what really brought Davis down, not the economic shock. Nobody likes repeated blackouts in a modern developed country, and once the depth of the Enron scandal was loose, it was only natural people were going to blame the government in one form or another.
Correct, and Davis had other problems in addition. Particulary his pay-for-play stuff was very unpopular. The dude raised and spent record sums just to bring down a moderate GOPer in the primary, against whom he would have lost badly.
