Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, whose hopes for a full term were washed out in California's Democratic "rip current" this month, took a small step toward trying to repair his party's poor standing among Latino voters today by staging a press conference call to promote the federal Dream Act now being debated in Congress.

Maldonado was joined on the conference call by Pedro Ramirez, the Fresno State University student president, who publicly disclosed this month that he is not a legal resident of this country. Thanks to legislation co-authored by Maldonado as a member of the Assembly in 2001, Ramirez and other nonresident aliens like him who graduated from California high schools are able to pay in-state tuition to attend public colleges and universities in California.

Maldonado was particularly critical of pundits and politicians who mischaracterize the California law as providing "free tuition for illegal aliens."

"It's not," he said. "Students still have to pay in-state tuition."

If students such as Ramirez -- who came to this country as a 3-year-old and attended Calfiornia public schools from kindergarten through high school -- had to pay out-of-state-tuition, they would never be able to afford college, Maldonado said.

"Allow him to become a taxpayer who will be paying more taxes down the road," Maldonado said. "As Californians, we're going to get our money back."

More evidence that political campaigns in America have become not much more than reality TV programming: NBC, Politico and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library announced today they will sponsor the first debate among Republican candidates for president in 2012 -- and that the event will take place just a few months from now, in the spring of 2011.

Does anyone think such an ultra-early debate will serve any purpose other than to provide chatter for the cable TV screamers and political bloggers? Even voters in Iowa and New Hampshire won't be paying any attention nearly a year out from their early caucus and primary. And in all likelihood the issues that will matter most won't yet even be known.

The attorney general's race between Republican Steve Cooley and Democrat Kamala Harris is on its way toward becoming one of the closest statewide contests in California history.

As of today, Cooley leads by 51,439 votes. But will that lead hold up?

Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how things might end up. The 21 counties with the most ballots yet to be counted account for 1.5 million of the 1.7 million ballots remaining to be tabulated. If the remaining votes among those 21 counties were to be split proportionately with the votes in those counties that have already been counted, Harris would gain another 36,000 votes.

For example, Cooley won Sacramento County by 4 percentage points. Since it has 101,000 votes yet to be counted, he could reasonably expect to add 4,000 votes to his lead there. Or, Harris won Contra Costa County by 13 points, and could therefore expect to gain 11,000 votes once its 85,000 outstanding ballots are counted. And so on, through the other 19 counties with the most outstanding votes.

If the combined results in all those counties turns out to be proportional, it would mean that Cooley would still be up by about 15,000 votes out of about 8.5 million total votes.

The bottom line: Whichever way it turns out, this race could be even closer than the 2002 contest for controller, in which Democrat Steve Westly ultimately beat Republican Tom McClintock by 16,811 votes.

Ventura County's reputation as being something of a bellwether county -- solidified by the fact that its voters have picked the winner in presidential elections more than 95 percent of the time over the last century -- took a beating on Tuesday. It appears, at least for the moment, that the county has reverted to its Orange County-like conservatism of the Reagan years, when the only thing that kept its bellwether reputation intact was the fact that the rest of the country was enamored of Ronald Reagan as well.

In Tuesday's vote in the governor's race, there was an 18-point variance from the statewide result. Meg Whitman carried Ventura County 50 percent to 45 percent, while Jerry Brown carried the state 54 percent to 41 percent.

There was a decided Republican tilt to the Ventura County vote in the previous three gubernatorial elections as well, but nothing like last night. In 2006, the variance was 5 percentage points; in 2002, 9 percentage points; and in 1998, 10 percentage points.

The evidence is pretty clear that in Ventura County yesterday, Democrats largely stayed home -- conceding back to Republicans the dominance they have enjoyed, with a very brief interruption, since the early 1980s.

The Field Poll, in its final pre-election report, details its projections, based on voter interviews, of what the California electorate looked like today.

As usual, it's quite a distorted reflection of the California population -- and even of its pool of registered voters. The estimates: 52 percent were age 50 or older, 71 percent were non-Hispanic whites and 52 percent were college graduates.

Sandra Kinsler, president of the Democratic Club of Ventura, reports that the phones were ringing at the county party's headquarters last night for a peculiar reason -- people were calling because they'd just received a hang-up call that they believed came from that number.

In all likelihood, Kinsler said, the prank calls mimicked a tactic that has been employed elsewhere in the country as a political dirty trick. Calls are made using a device which leaves as its phone number the Democratic Party number.

Kinsler said that despite the nuisance -- both to those who received the calls and to Democratic Party volunteers -- the activity did not stymie the local party's get-out-the-vote phone calling because another line was used to make those calls.

With Northern California having coming down with a serious case of World Series fever, San Francisco pollster Ben Tulchin added a baseball question to his latest California political poll and came up with some interesting differences between those in the state who are rooting for the Giants and those who are pulling for the Texas Rangers.

First, as expected, the large majority of Californians are rooting for the in-state team -- 53 percent for the Giants, 15 percent for the Rangers.

Among Giants fans, Democratic candidates are dominating. They favor Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman 56 percent to 32 percent, Barbara Boxer over Carly Fiorina 59 percent to 33 percent and Gavin Newsom over Abel Maldonado 52 percent to 24 percent.

Rangers' fans tend to be Republicans, and are backing Whitman, Fiorina and Maldonado.

Perhaps the best hope for the GOP slate is that the Giants wrap up the World Series with a a victory tonight. The party in Northern California might be so wild that many Giants fans will be either too tired or too hungover, or both, to make it to the polls tomorrow.