POLLSTERS, SCHMOLLSTERS CALIFORNIANS' VIEWS SELDOM MATCH UP WITH MEDIA EXPECTATIONS.

Byline: JILL STEWART Capitol Punishment

IT'S a presidential election year, a Sacramento legislative battle year and a ballot-measure year. That means it's poll season. For me, dazed and confused in recent years by contradictory polls and the unpredictable political mutts known as California voters, I say, poll season, schmoll season.

You may recall how the Los Angeles Times Poll bungled the recall issue last year, adding so many blacks and Asians into its supposedly accurate ``sample'' of Californians that its poll showed a tie when the recall was well ahead.

You may recall pollsters blowing it in 2000, saying Gray Davis would beat the stuffing out of weak gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon. Republican Simon lost only narrowly - in a state dominated by Democratic voters.

Californians are mercurial. There's little doubt President George W. Bush will lose here. But after we agree on that, conventional wisdom flies out the door.

With Republicans fighting to recoup legislative seats, and with an array of measures on the ballot - from gambling to health care to election reform - we'll soon learn how Californians really feel.

Only one prediction is solid: California voters continually resist the media's biased assumptions.

As Republican pollster Stephen Kinney points out, Californians have a conservative streak. We support school prayer and oppose partial-birth abortion. We voted to protect heterosexual marriage, then strongly opposed gay marriage in a Times poll. We ended affirmative action and enacted English immersion. We demanded, ``Three strikes and you're out.''

Yet look at our liberal side. Support for stem-cell research is growing despite its $3 billion price tag. We heavily favor gun control and are avid environmentalists. A Sept. 23 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California (which rarely blows it) shows we favor ``universal health care'' run by government - which we deeply mistrust.

Does the following fact make us liberal, conservative or moderate? Only 1 percent of us see abortion as an important election issue.

It's enough to drive a pundit mad. With major ads about to hit the airwaves, nobody knows what voters will do. ``They love to surprise us,'' Kinney notes.

Mark Baldassare, director of PPIC, sees Nov. 2 as a detailed window into how Californians think. Refreshingly, he doesn't pretend to know.

``On many social issues - abortion, guns, environment - Californians are pretty liberal. But on fiscal issues, they have a reputation of being pretty tight with taxes and government spending. And, they are pretty conservative on crime issues, and on immigration issues have certainly tended to the conservative side. It gets very complex.''

Will Californians stick it to the rich? We'll see when voters decide whether to back a poorly conceived measure to shore up mental-health services by taxing millionaires.

Is it sinking in with voters that businesses cannot afford the $11 billion Prop. 72, which requires private firms to pay worker health premiums? Or, do Californians reject the fear that employers will flee to 48 other states that lack this pricey mandate?

A few clear trends are emerging. Thankfully, Californians are getting wary of casinos, just four years after enthusiastically handing the Indian tribes a lucrative slot machine monopoly.

Prop. 70 seeks massive expansion of casinos. Competing Prop. 68 opens the door to slot machines at race tracks. Yet a new Times poll shows only 33 percent support Prop. 68, and only 28 percent like Prop. 70.

Californians don't want to be twice burned. In 2000, we were promised (by tribes and the often useless League of Women Voters) that casinos would rise only on ``Indian land.'' It turned out anything could later be declared ``Indian land'' by powerful politicians. As a result, numerous tribes are shopping for faux ``reservations'' in or near cities.

My big issue is the ``open primary,'' Prop. 62. Will voters adopt this needed reform? Or will they get confused by our state Legislature's sly countermeasure to stop this reform and keep the closed primary, Prop. 60?

In 1996, Californians approved open primaries to allow ``swing voting.'' Outraged, the Democratic and Republican parties sued to stop voters from having that choice. The U.S. Supreme Court backed the parties, but gave us some very big hints about how to create a legal open primary. That version is on the ballot.

All this angst over allowing ``swing voting'' dovetails nicely with some fascinating new data showing that Californians increasingly register as ``decline to state,'' and reject both parties.

Baldassare sees worries here for Democrats. Latinos - in some private polls, particularly Latinas - are increasingly choosing ``decline to state.'' Republican pollster Kinney says, ``Latinas are not switching to Republican, but they are avoiding becoming Democrats. It's interesting, isn't it?''

Politicians dread such uncertainty. But the rest of us should celebrate the mystery that is election season. Typecasting of California voters often proves wrong. And luckily for us, the voters are still clearly in charge.