Earlier primary fails to engage

Hillary Clinton ate pork chops and visited a quilt exhibit at the Iowa State Fair in August. Mitt Romney had his son tour all 99 Iowa counties in a Winnebago.

But when it comes to playing to voters in a crucial presidential state, the top prize goes to Barack Obama, who scored an endorsement from famed butter cow sculptor and dairy farmer Duffy Lyon.

"You know, you see a lot of manure in our line of work," Lyon says in a Midwestern twang during a radio ad. "It's a lot like politics. You've got to know what's bull. And what's for real. Barack Obama's got a real plan for rural America."

Even though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic leaders moved up California's presidential primary date from June to February with a promise that "California will have the influence that it deserves," candidates have yet to sip zinfandel at the California State Fair or tout an endorsement from the Golden State version of Duffy Lyon.

As candidates enter the thick of primary season, most are saving their serious campaign efforts for states holding January elections such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

That's largely because California's Feb. 5 primary date is no longer unique – or all that early. More than 20 other states followed suit by scheduling their elections for the same day, and six states leapfrogged California altogether by holding their contests in January.

Some political analysts believe the nearly two dozen "Super Tuesday" states may simply validate nominees chosen by early state voters as the field shrinks throughout January.

"If you let history be the guide, that's the way it works," said Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, which handicaps state political races.

Few candidates have built significant operations in California, and none has yet aired radio or television ads on the state's expensive media airwaves. Most Democratic and Republican candidates who have state-specific sections on their Web sites focus on four or five January states. Only Clinton and Obama have created substantial California pages.

"The governor was correct that it would make California more relevant, and it has, but the state is still in a second-tier category with the rest of the country," said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant and California adviser to Romney. "What moving us up has done is saved us from being completely irrelevant, which the state has been in the past."

Most efforts in California have focused on grass-roots organizing rather than money-intensive operations involving dozens of campaign field offices, like those found in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Clinton's campaign has trained volunteers to establish networks through house parties and phone banks and maintains offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Obama's campaign, which has offices in Oakland and Los Angeles, signed up 117,000 supporters in California through its Web site and is focused on organizing volunteer teams, said spokeswoman Debbie Mesloh.

Giuliani's campaign has named chairs in each congressional district to lead volunteer efforts and has a headquarters in Glendale, said spokesman Jarrod Agen.

Candidates have held 244 events since April in California, the fourth-most visited state, according to New York Times data. Several Democratic candidates spoke at the state Democratic convention earlier this year, while Republicans Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have appeared at the state GOP convention the past two years.

Romney has held three town-hall meetings in California in seven trips to the state, said Sarah Pompei, a Romney spokeswoman. He does not yet have a headquarters here.

"As voters are paying attention to the campaign and watching the early states vote, we are hoping that will help grow support for Governor Romney as well," Pompei said.

When Schwarzenegger signed legislation to move the primary date, he bemoaned that candidates previously "collected millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and then they left as quickly as possible. I'm happy to say that those days are over."

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• Call Kevin Yamamura, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5548.