Another significant part of the election this year was that the governor had very little in the way of coattails for any of the Republican downticket candidates. The only Republican downticket candidate who won was Insurance Commissioner-elect Steve Poizner, who beat out Cruz Bustamante by a 51-39% margin.

All of the other Republicans lost, despite polls and pundit assessments in the run-up to the election that predicted that many of them would win. Tom McClintock lost to John Garamendi by 49-45%. Tony Strickland lost to John Chiang by 51-40%. Steve McPherson lost to Debra Bowen by 48-45%. The attorney general and treasurer races were decided by even wider margins.

Our handy cheat sheets of election results for statewide races are now live.

Check out our page of ballot measure and major statewide officeholder results.

We’ve also posted a page of detailed statewide officeholder results, including the tallies for all minor-party candidates.

Also, don’t forget our page of campaign finance figures. It’s a one-stop resource that will tell you where all the big money funding supporters and opponents of the ballot measures came from.

More resources to come, shortly. Stay tuned.

A long article by Steven Harmon in this morning’s San José Mercury News revisits the notion that Angelides’ poor showing in polls could drag the rest of the statewide Democratic ticket down with him. The article points out that the races for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and insurance commissioner are far tighter at this point than the seeming national against the GOP would seem to predict.
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According to an October 6 Los Angeles Times article, spending on the ballot measure and candidate campaigns is “hurtling toward the $400-million mark for the year.” Some data points from the article:

• Jerry Brown, the former governor, current mayor of Oakland, and Democratic candidate for attorney general, has outfundraised his Republican opponent, Fresno state senator Chuck Poochigian, by a nearly 2-1 margin ($4.2 million to $2.4 million).

• Schwarzenegger’s campaign spent $9 million on TV ads in the campaign reporting period between July 1 and September 30.

• Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who is running for treasurer, the job currently held by Phil Angelides, has spent $1 million this year, although virtually nobody but political junkies knows who his Republican opponent, Claude Parrish, is.

Here’s another opinion to add to the meme that California is going to buck the anti-incumbent, anti-GOP national trend. (Note, though, that the “national anti-GOP wave” meme is itself not necessarily on solid ground, given the GOP’s significant advantages in cash, GOTV ground game, and congressional district boundaries — all three of those items are virtually ignored in mainstream media coverage in favor of the scandal du jour, but all three are structural bulwarks that undoubtedly favor the Republicans.)

Dan Walters, the veteran Sacramento Bee columnist, writes in yesterday’s paper:

Why, one might ask, isn’t the national Democratic tide washing over California? Partially, it’s because with the state’s incumbent-friendly, gerrymandered congressional districts, Iraq and other national issues are not generating political heat. Angelides has gamely attempted to link Schwarzenegger to President Bush, but the governor has carefully distanced himself from the White House, and the Angelides strategy doesn’t appear to be working.

Another factor is simply that Angelides is a poor candidate, with little ideological or personal appeal to swing voters, and several other Democratic candidates suffer from the same malady. Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, for example, is a very weak campaigner with a less-than-stellar résumé — which explains why even liberal consumer advocates are opting for Republican Poizner as the two vie for insurance commissioner.

There was an intriguing report on tonight’s KTVU (the Bay Area Fox affiliate) “News at Ten” by political reporter Randy Shandobil. The gist was that while Democrats may be salivating at the prospect of retaking the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, due to a series of scandals and other setbacks that have befallen the Republican Party, in California just the opposite trend may occur, due to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s double-digit poll lead. Shandobil outlined four statewide downticket races that some political pundits are predicting could go Republican in four weeks: lieutenant governor, controller, insurance commissioner, and secretary of state. Dan Schnur, visiting lecturer at the Center on Politics, said that he thought some Democrats might sit this election out if Angelides’ fortunes don’t improve:

In all likelihood, if you’re a Democrat in the first week of November and you know that Angelides is going to lose, and that he’s probably going to lose badly, it’s awfully tough to motivate yourself off the couch and down to the polls.