I live in the San Diego area and have not seen one Davis ad. It appears that hardly anyone here is paying any attention to the Simon/Davis race with the Danielle van Dam murder/Westerfield trial gobbling up all the media attention here.
Under these circumstances, the Simon campaign shouldn't spend money here. San Diego generally goes more conservative than L.A. or even Imperial county to the east, anyway.
I must confess that since 1996, I feel conservative candidates should be far more aggressive in combatting and countering Democrats and their campaigns of defamation, fear-mongering, and bold prevarications.
I know Davis is in trouble, but this is California. Tides can turn in strange intervals. Nothing seems conventional here anymore.
But now you know Davis will be trumpeting the organizations run by the suits in law enforcement that always seem to go democrap.
I think that best summarizes the starting point for both candidates. Grayout has the bucks and can afford to "burn" some of his corrupt donations early on. One "convention" thus far is that no sooner does he do this then it gets nullified by another scandal, story of incompetence or bad economic news. Burn grey burn!
Davis is only running them in limited media markets. L.A. and Sacramento, I think.
You're right about one thing: anything can happen. California is a fickle state. But in this case, I think they have just about had it with Gray Davis. If Simon doesn't make major mistakes, I think that he can beat Gray Davis, even if Davis doesn't make any more major mistakes. Reason? Davis has already made major blunders that people are not happy about, and I don't think they are ready to forgive (education and energy and budget deficit come to mind).
We'll see. But we have a lot of time.
Go Simon!