When it comes to presidential campaigns, California just can’t get any respect.

To make the state more relevant in the presidential nominating process, the primary was moved up to March, but then other states leapfrogged the date and made California largely irrelevant once again. Frustrated legislators gave up and this year moved the primary back to June.

As for the general election, California was largely a bystander as Democratic nominee John Kerry sewed up the state’s 55 Electoral College delegates months ago. With little incentive to campaign here given the winner-take-all system, the candidates instead have used the state as a kind of giant ATM, drawing tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, as happened in 2000 and 1996.

But what if California chose its presidential electors in proportion to the popular vote? With the equivalent of Ohio or Pennsylvania at stake, both candidates might have actually campaigned here to secure as many electoral votes as possible.

“Right now, Republicans ignore us and Democrats take us for granted,” said Elizabeth Garrett, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “We would have tremendous clout with our electoral votes if they were proportional. It might make us a bigger player in getting a return on our dollars.”

Whether it would ever happen is another story.

Given that President Bush won both the popular vote and the electoral college, there is likely to be less clamoring in 2004 than in 2000 for abolishment of the winner-take-all electoral system that’s used in most states. That was underscored when Colorado voters last week resoundingly turned down a measure that would have divvied up the state’s electoral delegates based on the popular vote.

It could further be argued that a proportional system, which would require a constitutional amendment, might generate relatively scant interest. President Bush, after all, would have been assured of two-dozen or so electoral votes based on last week’s tallies without any campaigning at all. The potential incremental gains in electoral delegates might not be worth the cost and time.

Democrat losses

Currently, no state uses proportional representation to choose presidential electors. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, allocate two electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote; the remaining electoral votes are divided among the winners in individual congressional districts.

Lacking any national mandate to abolish the Electoral College, there would be little statewide interest in moving unilaterally certainly not now, with Democrats in the majority.

“If you went to proportional voting in California, that would immediately give the Republican candidate another Ohio or Pennsylvania and take away the equivalent of Ohio or Pennsylvania from the Democrats,” Garrett said.

In a Field Poll taken last month, the Democrats favored keeping the current winner-take-all method by a 52 percent to 35 percent margin.

“I am not in favor of proportional representation and am opposed to any introduction of that here in California,” said state Democratic Party chairman Art Torres. “If such a proposal did come before the voters in California, there would be a huge national campaign (from Democrats) to defeat it.”

Among Republicans, support for proportional representation is tepid at best, despite the fact that Republicans stand to make considerable short-term gains. In the Field Poll, 45 percent of Republicans favored changing to a proportional system, while 42 percent were opposed.

“Historically, California has tended to support Republican candidates for president. So if we’re going to change this, we shouldn’t do it on the basis of how it may affect the next one or two elections,” said State Republican Party chairman Duf Sundheim. “We really need to figure out its impact.”

With the parties split on the idea, “the Legislature would never put this on the ballot given its current makeup,” said Mark DiCamillo, lead researcher for the Field Poll.

Schwarzenegger’s role

That leaves a citizen initiative as the most likely path, although a costly one: it would take at least $2 million to qualify it for the ballot and millions of dollars more to run the campaign against expected fierce Democrat opposition.

California has no shortage of millionaires willing to bankroll initiatives most famously Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, who put up $2 million of his own money to qualify the recall initiative for last year’s statewide ballot.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could play a big role toward overcoming entrenched Democratic opposition, but so far the governor has shown no interest in the idea and gave only lukewarm support for the open primary measure that was defeated on last week’s ballot.

With little chance of a national effort to move to proportional selection of electors, and long odds on any such effort in California, the best hope for making California more relevant may lie with the candidates themselves, according to Bill Whalen, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

“Look, if you have a candidate with broad crossover appeal, like (Ronald) Reagan had, there will be a race in California and the state will be the focus of an intense campaign,” he said.