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With that lethal combination of advisors, the Riordan campaign set its initial strategy, which, from all appearances, was to insult, defame, and vilify the Republican voter base at every opportunity. If you didn't agree with Dick Riordan you were obviously anti-woman, anti-immigrant, and probably antediluvian.
And just in case any casual Republican missed the message that they were stupid, bigoted, and hopelessly behind the times, Riordan went out of his way to insult former Governor George Duekmejian at the GOP state convention.

The conceit of the Riordan loyalists and their media megaphones is that the Davis anti-Riordan commercials swung the election to Simon. They did not.

I don't live in the state, but this is a pretty comprehensive analysis of what transpired in last month's primaries. From a political prospective, whoever ran Riordan's campaign is a total idiot. This piece labels the Riordan camp as (paraphrase) myopic liberals who are out of touch with the average Republican and it seems likely this is true. I agree that if Riordan emphasized his past efforts on ending bilingual education and getting rid of Rose Bird, the worst judge ever in California's history, would have sealed the primary for him.

(Did you know Rose Bird commuted every single death sentence before her? The numbers of communations, which totaled over 60, is bad, but the circumstances surrounding some of the cases showed a clear disregard for the law by her. The most striking one was a case where an employee walked into his old office with a gun and a list of "People to Kill". No premeditation here folks! The point is that I don't even live in CA but a mention of this in Riordan's campaign could have swayed the average GOP vote like myself)

This piece labels the Riordan camp as (paraphrase) myopic liberals who are out of touch

Yes. Now the real test. Are the state's democrats out of touch? With 61% of the voters voting against teaching math and history in Spanish, and 61% of the voters voting against gay marriage, and 63% of the voters voting for the legalization of medicinal marijuana... and with Davis squandering $20 billion in a corrupted energy boondoggle and trying to take credit for the conservation efforts that the citizens themselves initiated to save our power, and his unwillingness to remove MTBE from the gasoline as it poisons our water supply, it should be pretty easy to cast Davis as a hard-core tax and spend special-interest liberal who doesn't care about the will of the voters.

Is the Simon camp up for kicking Davis while he's down? I sure hope so.