LOS ANGELES — In mid-September, many California voters got their first introduction to Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, and it was not a pleasant one. She was, TV viewers were told over and over again, a heartless corporate bigwig who blithely fired her workers and sent their jobs overseas, all while raking in millions and living the high life.
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO has barely responded to that damning portrayal in a 30-second TV ad aired by her opponent, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. And if the first-time candidate loses on Tuesday, as polls indicate is likely, one of the main reasons will be that she violated a cardinal rule of politics: Don’t allow your opponent to define you.
Fiorina settled on a campaign strategy early on of trying to make the election a referendum on Boxer and the sour economy, relentlessly attacking the three-term incumbent on TV as an arrogant career politician whose policies contributed to Californians’ economic pain.
But most voters were already familiar with Boxer and her liberal political philosophy after her 18 years in the Senate. Fiorina, by contrast, was a political unknown. But she has barely made an affirmative case for herself or her candidacy in the all-important medium of TV, allowing Boxer’s unsavory portrayal of her to go unchallenged.
Several voters who came to see Fiorina in person on the campaign trail last week said they were struck by how different the candidate is in person from how she’s depicted on TV. Fiorina warmly recalled her early life, including her amazement at seeing oranges on trees when she moved to California as a girl and her early stumbles finding a career path. With the ease and command of a talk-show host, she went on to describe some of the personal triumphs that eventually brought her to the highest rungs of corporate America.
“She’s much more genuine in person than she is on TV,” said Raquel Unger, a real estate agent who arrived at a campaign stop in Orange County undecided on the Senate race but left counting herself a Fiorina supporter.
“She wasn’t like she’s shown on TV — all the stuff about firing people and sending jobs out of the country,” Republican voter Ethel Lover said after a different Fiorina event.
But in a state as vast as California, only a sliver of voters actually see candidates in person; their main exposure is in TV ads. Fiorina never aired a biographical ad about herself. She did appear in several spots but never gave voters a real sense of herself, instead stating platitudes like: “When bickering ends, solutions begin. No partisan games. I’ll reach across the aisle, work with others, oppose my party as needed. Your agenda, not mine.”
One reason is that Fiorina, unlike Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, had a limited campaign war chest and had to make tough calls about how to get the most bang for her TV ad bucks.
“There was a strategic decision in our campaign to make this race a referendum on Barbara Boxer and her 28 years of failure for California, and to argue the race on our terms, not hers,” said Julie Soderlund, deputy campaign manager for Fiorina.
On the issues, each candidate has portrayed the other as extreme. But Fiorina bore the extra burden of having orchestrated layoffs during her years at Palo Alto-based HP — a particularly heavy burden in the current economic climate.
And her conservative stances on the environment, gun control and abortion have made the job of winning over sizable numbers of independents and Democrats — a must for a Republican candidate in California — that much harder, analysts say.
“However much people dislike Boxer, from what we’ve seen a majority aren’t ready to support the core values of Fiorina,” said San Jose State political-science professor Larry Gerston. He added that there was no easy way for Fiorina to counter Boxer’s criticism of her reign at HP and that doing so would shift the race to treacherous terrain for Fiorina.
“It’s like a tennis serve that’s an ace — sometimes there’s just no return,” Gerston said. “The problem is that Boxer has been serving it over and over.”
The two candidates spent Sunday making their closing arguments to voters in appearances across the state. Boxer spent the day in Los Angeles, dancing and chanting along with churchgoers at an African-American church and urging union members to get out the vote. Fiorina implored her supporters to do the same at events in Palm Desert, Fresno and Walnut Creek.
Fiorina remains confident that her anti-Boxer message will prevail. Though she trails the senator in every major public poll, the margins are close in some surveys, and at least two respected political handicappers, the Cook Political Report and Real Clear Politics, rate the race a tossup.
“At the end of the day, this race is about Barbara Boxer and what she hasn’t delivered,” Soderlund said.
Bay Area News Group staff writer Roman Gokhman contributed to this report. Contact Mike Zapler at 202-662-8921.
