From the Chronicle:
Jerry Brown, who just began his official run for a third term as California's governor, may need a more aggressive fundraising effort to compete with Republican Meg Whitman, who is mining deep-pocketed donors across the nation, Democratic strategists say.... Mark Petracca, a political science professor at UC Irvine, said Wednesday that "the Democratic anxiety is easy to understand" given that Whitman has been campaigning and fundraising for months while Brown is just beginning to campaign. He warned that the gubernatorial campaign calendar and the electorate have changed markedly since Brown last ran for the job in 1978. In 2010, millions of California voters are expected to cast absentee ballots beginning 30 days before election day on Nov. 2. "I'm not sure [Brown] or his consultants are really focusing on the fact that the timing of when people vote is substantially different," Petracca said. "The old strategy of husbanding your resources and engaging in a blitzkrieg of ads used to work when 98 percent of the people were voting on election day. That strategy doesn't play out anymore."

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