The high-profile ballot measures, like Proposition 86 and 87, have roomsful of money to spend on tens of millions of dollars in ad buys dropped by deep-pocketed donors to make sure that the measures’ pros and cons are getting exhaustive exposure to the voting public — or at least the version of pros and cons that ad writers craft.

Other measures are flying under the radar and getting the word out to potential supporters in other ways. One example is Proposition 85, the measure that would require parental notification for minors to take place before an abortion could occur (and would also enact less well-publicized requirements, such as mandating that doctors report how many abortions they perform on minors per year).

According to a Riverside Press-Enterprise article yesterday, polls consistently indicate that a significant majoirty of Californians do not want Roe v. Wade overturned, but they have much less difficulty with laws that make abortions more difficult to get.

Last year, Proposition 73, which was substantially the same measure as Proposition 85, failed at the polls by a margin of 53-47%. The supporters of Proposition 85 argue that they re-introduced the measure this year because the merits of last year’s proposition got swamped by the unpopularity of the governor’s raft of special election measures.

The Press-Enterprise article echoes this view, noting that the political climate is different this time around. A UC Riverside political science professor, Shaun Bowler, is quoted in the article as saying, “This is one of those hot-button issues that should generate lots of turnout among conservative voters.”

Proposition 85 could well pass this year — without more than a fraction of the publicity or advertising that’s flowed into higher-profile proposition campaigns.

Al Gore is the star of a new ad that started appearing on TV on Monday in support of Proposition 87. It’s a 30-second ad, in which Gore, much in the same way that he did in his hit summer documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” intones the following script with a surpising lack of condescension in his voice:

Here is the truth the oil companies won’t tell you: half the foreign oil they import to California is from the Middle East. As a result, California is dangerously dependent on foreign oil. Prop 87 means more alternative fuels and wind and solar power, and that means less oil dependence. Prop 87 is the one thing Californians can do now to clean up the air, help stop the climate crisis, and free us from foreign oil. The sooner we do it, the safer we’ll be.

Meanwhile, expenditures on the campaigns for and against the alternative energy measure officially passed the $104 million mark in spending this past week. That makes the fight over Proposition 87 the most expensive ballot measure campaign in state history, surpassing the cash dumped into the campaigns around Proposition 78 (the measure calling for a discount prescription program for impoverished Californians) last year and Proposition 5 in 1998 (the Indian gaming compact initiative).

Kind of makes you wonder what Hiram Johnson, the father of the California initiative process, would have thought.