| In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors. |
LOS ANGELES (AP) Eda Zahl said she was concerned about the allegations of Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping, unwanted sexual advances and lewd comments toward women.
On Election Day, it didn't matter. She voted to recall Gov. Gray Davis and replace him with the superstar actor.
``If he is elected, I would like him to talk about it and address it if not to me, then to his wife,'' Zahl said after voting in Hollywood.
The last-minute allegations of sexual misconduct that roiled the Schwarzenegger campaign registered little with women voters in Tuesday's historic election, according to results of an exit poll conducted for The Associated Press and other news organizations.
About half of women voters supported the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and more than 40 percent of them voted for Schwarzenegger, who rode the power of his celebrity to his first elective office.
Whether the governor-elect will be permanently tarnished by the reports that emerged in the last week of the campaign remains to be seen.
``That groundwork is there now if new charges should emerge,'' said Susan Rasky, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Just five days before the election, the Los Angeles Times, in a lengthy story, detailed allegations from six women who said Schwarzenegger groped or sexually harassed them between 1975 and 2000. By Election Day, the number had grown to 16.
The charges prompted a San Francisco assemblyman to introduce legislation he dubbed ``Arnold's Law,'' which would increase penalties and extend the statute of limitations for sexual harassment in the workplace. The state's Democratic attorney general asked Schwarzenegger to cooperate in an investigation, even though the statute of limitations had expired.
Observers warned that even more women could come forward.
The morning the story appeared in the Times, Schwarzenegger apologized and admitted that he had ``behaved badly,'' but he denied specific charges. As the days wore on, he and his campaign advisers attacked the newspaper and political opponents for ``puke politics.''
The Times lost 1,000 subscribers, and media observers debated the propriety of publishing such blockbuster revelations just days before the election.
In the end, it didn't seem to have much effect.
About seven in 10 Election Day voters said they made up their minds more than a month ago on how to vote on the recall, and the roughly 10 percent who decided within the last three days voted for the recall in similar proportions as those who decided earlier.
Female voters were divided evenly on whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Schwarzenegger, while 55 percent of men rated him favorably.
The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, found 49 percent of men and 43 percent of women voted for Schwarzenegger; 32 percent of men and 36 percent of women voted for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante; and 11 percent of men and 14 percent of women voted for McClintock.
Of Schwarzenegger's women voters, 80 percent were white.
Men also had more of an appetite to recall Davis, voting to oust the governor by a 3-to-2 ratio. Just more than half of women voters did so.
Had the story been published earlier, the allegations might have had more impact on voters, Rasky said.
``If the opposition really wanted to use it as its cudgel, it needed more time,'' she said.
Still, the newspaper was criticized for dropping the story in the last days of the campaign, Rasky said. By having the allegations surface before the election, she said Schwarzenegger can call it ancient history.
Since the Times story about Schwarzenegger caused such a furor, the governor-elect probably will be ``very cautious with his behavior,'' said Jodie Evans of the women's activist group CodePink.
She said her organization will be watching him.
The allegations weren't about sex, Evans said.
``This was about power, control, manipulation and humiliation,'' she said. ``That's something to watch. How does he behave as governor? Does this pattern show up?''