No Republican candidate for governor or president since the 1970’s has won in California without getting at least one-third of the Hispanic vote, which Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, achieved in a wide-open recall election in 2003. In his bid for re-election in November, he faces the difficult task of courting both Latino voters and his core conservative supporters, two groups that are often far apart on immigration.
The immigration debate in Congress has also rippled into several other races for governor, including those in Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Colorado and Arizona. Democrats and Republicans are carefully staking out their positions, often with intense political calculation.
Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat, has sought to appear tough, declaring a state of emergency last year in the four border counties that bear the brunt of the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico. But this spring, with a commanding lead in the polls, Ms. Napolitano rejected bills from the Republican-dominated Legislature intended to make life harder for illegal residents and the businesses that employ them, questioning the legality and effectiveness of the proposals.
In Massachusetts, two of the three Democrats in the primary race for governor have said they would consider using state troopers to enforce immigration law, as Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, has proposed.
“It’s like Iraq,” said Jennifer E. Duffy, who tracks governors’ races for The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter in Washington. “It may not be the driving issue of a campaign, but every candidate has a position that has been articulated.”
As a Republican in a state dominated by Democrats, Mr. Schwarzenegger has a difficult task in balancing the two competing constituencies, Ms. Duffy said, because “if just Republicans vote for him, he loses.”
So one week Mr. Schwarzenegger defends his support for the Minutemen civilian patrols on the border that many conservatives strongly endorse, and the next he distances himself from an anti-illegal-immigrant ballot initiative passed in 1994 that galvanized Latino political involvement on the side of Democrats.
At a recent town-hall-style campaign appearance by Mr. Schwarzenegger in Orange County, Larry Collins, vice president of a local Republican club, asked the first question, and it was about border security.
Mr. Collins said later that although he supported Mr. Schwarzenegger, he wanted the governor to take a harder line on immigration. He said he could not bear hearing more and more Spanish being spoken in the county, and he wondered about the legality of the newcomers. “We are being overloaded with a potential hazard,” Mr. Collins said.
Even as Mr. Schwarzenegger seeks to hold on to voters like Mr. Collins, he is striving to attract Latinos. His aides concede that if the election is close, Latino voters could prove vital, and so they have embarked on a campaign to attract them, particularly native-born middle-class and professional Latinos.
The aides predict that these Latinos are more likely to approve of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s stance on other issues, such as his advocacy for small businesses and tax cuts and his promises to improve education and health care.
On Monday, Mr. Schwarzenegger sent one of the nation’s most prominent Latino Republican businessmen, Hector V. Barreto, the former head of the Small Business Administration and a board member of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, to court Latino business owners and others in San Francisco.
“This will be an example of how we’re going to run campaigns differently in the Latino community for both Republicans and Democrats,” said Matthew Dowd, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s chief strategist, who has set a goal of getting 35 percent of the Latino vote.
Mr. Schwarzenegger has given no speeches specifically on immigration reform. But in newspaper opinion articles and at campaign stops he has said that he generally supports President Bush’s advocacy of more border security, while he also backs measures that would steer some illegal immigrants toward citizenship.
As the governor of California, he reluctantly sent National Guard troops to the border this summer at the request of Mr. Bush, but rejected another request for more troops.
Still, at a speech on Saturday at the state Republican Party’s summer convention in Los Angeles, Mr. Schwarzenegger sought to rally the party faithful in part by criticizing his Democratic opponent’s objection to having the Guard at the border. He also attacked his opponent, Phil Angelides, the state treasurer, for his support for allowing illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, as a public safety measure.
“My opponent wants to pull the National Guard off the border,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “He wants to give undocumented workers California driver’s licenses. His policies are disastrous.”
Mr. Schwarzenegger also urged immigrants to learn English, offering himself, tongue in cheek, as an example.
“Being an American means learning English,’’ said Mr. Schwarzenegger, a naturalized citizen from Austria whose accent supplies late-night comediens with endless material. “I know because I did, not that it is perfect nearly mind you, but I did. And we must also help immigrants get the same tutoring I got so they can learn English as quickly as possible.’’
Democrats are quick to point out that Mr. Schwarzenegger once said the United States should “close our borders,” only to clarify the statement to “secure our borders” after being criticized. Democrats view his back and forth as political expediency.
“We have seen the governor waffle and flip-flop,” State Senator Gil Cedillo, Democrat of Los Angeles, said in a conference call with reporters last week. He called on Mr. Schwarzenegger to debate Mr. Angelides on Spanish-language television.
Mr. Angelides is expected to get most of the Latino vote and has endorsements from several high-ranking elected Latino Democrats, with the glaring exception of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, a Democrat and Mexican-American. To the consternation of Mr. Angelides’s supporters, the mayor has withheld a promised endorsement while he rallies bipartisan support, including Mr. Schwarzenegger’s, for legislation to give him a role in running the public schools.
A Field Poll in July showed Mr. Angelides leading Mr. Schwarzenegger among Latinos by 58 percent to 22 percent, with 20 percent undecided or supporting other candidates. The poll, which sampled 992 registered voters from July 10 to 23 and has a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points, showed Mr. Schwarzenegger leading over all among likely voters, 45 percent to 37 percent.
Everywhere he stops, Mr. Schwarzenegger is mobbed for autographs, and it is no different among Hispanic voters (the governor has let it be known that he has starred in movies filmed in Mexico).
In July, Mr. Schwarzenegger fixed tortillas at the Olvera Street market, where tourists flock for a carefully constructed taste of old Mexican Los Angeles. The visit came days after news photographers snapped him grinning with Mr. Villaraigosa at the National Council of La Raza convention here.
Mr. Schwarzenegger rarely fails to highlight his own immigrant tale of arriving nearly penniless from Austria in 1968 — he is a naturalized United States citizen — and finding success in bodybuilding and Hollywood.
“I was able to make my dream turn into reality,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a stop in Orange County.
He has also appointed several Hispanics to his campaign and administration staff, including Arnoldo Torres, a former political analyst at the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, who is a senior adviser to the campaign. Mr. Schwarzenegger has also visited several heavily Latino neighborhoods and has made himself especially accessible to Spanish-language news media. (Mr. Schwarzenegger declined to be interviewed for this article).
“I’m glad he is working toward getting the Latino community,” said Martin Gonzalez, 35, an independent voter who watched Mr. Schwarzenegger campaign recently at a bakery started by Cuban immigrants in Glendale. “He is doing it now because now he knows we are important.”
Will he vote for Mr. Schwarzenegger?
“I just don’t know, but maybe,” Mr. Gonzalez said, adding with a laugh, “My kids like his movies.”
