Unlike some of the more fanciful lower-order candidates, Jerry Kunzman never deluded himself into thinking he could actually win the California gubernatorial recall election. In fact, the 39-year-old Bay Area entrepreneur, a registered Republican, never seriously entertained the notion of finishing in the top 10. So he was more than a little surprised to discover that, in rural Tulare County, he had finished fifth – behind Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cruz Bustamante, and Tom McClintock, but ahead of Peter Camejo and some of the more prominent dropout candidates such as Arianna Huffington, Bill Simon, and Peter Ueberroth.
In fact, Kunzman won roughly one-third of his 2,176 statewide votes in Tulare, even though he never set foot there during the campaign and knew not a soul in Visalia or any of the surrounding farm communities. He did almost as well in Fresno County, a little to the north. And, bucking the notion that his message somehow held particular appeal to Central Valley conservatives, there was the further anomaly of Humboldt County on the north coast, where he garnered 10 percent of his overall support.
“I wouldn’t have expected that at all,” a nonplussed Kunzman said in a phone interview from the Richmond offices of the National Auto Sport Association, where he is chief executive. “In the Central Valley, a radio station offered to play a 60-second message from me for the last three weeks of the campaign, so maybe that made a difference. But I sure would love to know what happened in Humboldt.”http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=343&IssueNum=21BBVers, others, any comments?