Long before the storm, Schwarzenegger had taken steps to insulate himself from the likelihood that his boorish behavior toward women might surface. When the Los Angeles Times did print graphic details from six women five days before the vote, he apologized immediately, if vaguely. Then he went right back to his bus tour and his throw-the-bums-out rhetoric, leaving reporters churning."Arnold ran a very effective campaign of just saying there's waste in government, there's special interests' influence and there's job-killing legislation getting passed in Sacramento," said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at the University of California-Berkeley. "That message drowned out everything else, including the sexual harassment stuff."
The message clearly resonated. Four in five voters interviewed as they left the polls Tuesday rated the California economy poor, and two-thirds disapproved of Davis. But what surprised political analysts most was that 43% of women stuck by the Terminator despite the harassment accusations.
And they weren't light charges. Going back 25 years to as recently as 2000, women said Schwarzenegger had grabbed their breasts, spanked them, pulled up their shirts and accosted them in elevators — all at a time when he reigned as one of Hollywood's most powerful figures.
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"Everybody jumped all over this, probably wrongly, as Gray Davis dirty politics, and voters discounted it," Bowler says.It helped that Schwarzenegger's aides, including experienced operatives who spent years in former governor Pete Wilson's administrations, performed what Cain calls "textbook damage control" — then got aggressive. The candidate himself said most of the charges weren't true without elaborating and blamed dirty politics.