Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has promised voters to apply her business savvy to running the state that roughly one-tenth of Americans call home. She can start by explaining why she had to spend $81 million, most of it hers, to win the Republican nomination for governor of California. Her opponent, Steve Poizner, spent $25 million.

The Democrat running for the job, former Gov. Jerry Brown, has been busy raising somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. He’s going to need it. Brown is running against a billionaire who knows what she wants and is apparently willing to pay for it.

At least Brown can take comfort in knowing that Whitman spent the GDP of a small country convincing a mostly blue state that she’s a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. — PZS

AP via Google:

Meg Whitman, the billionaire former chief executive of eBay, easily won the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, setting up a general election contest against former Gov. Jerry Brown.

Whitman took a large lead in the polls in the final weeks of the campaign after a negative ad war over which Republican was the most conservative.

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