Renegade University of California Regent Ward Connerly didn't plan it this way, but his Oct. 7 ballot initiative promoting a "colorblind society" could end up helping Gov. Gray Davis fight off a recall attempt on the same ballot.

At least that's the conclusion of two political analysts who have been studying the issue at California State University at Sacramento. Both believe Connerly's Proposition 54, embraced by conservatives but widely condemned by Democrats, could spark a big opposition turnout of minority and liberal voters -- a development that they say would benefit the embattled governor.

While Prop. 54, dubbed the "Racial Privacy Initiative," appeals to conservative voters, political experts say those voters will turn out anyway for Davis' recall. On the other hand, the initiative has galvanized affirmative action supporters who are mounting an aggressive campaign against it.

"The net difference goes to the Democrats," said Barbara O'Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media at CSU Sacramento.

"The unions and the Get Out the Vote effort will be pushing this," she said.

"It adds a moral imperative to get out and vote that they (initiative opponents) would not have had on the recall."

Tim Hodson,director of the Center for California Studies at CSU Sacramento, agrees.

"This gives an organizing tool for the Davis campaign to go into communities of color and liberal areas and say, 'This is a reason to get out and vote,' " Hodson said. "A good campaign political argument could be made in the African American community, in the Latino community, in liberal communities, that this is brought to you by the same people who hate affirmative action and is brought to you by the same people who are bringing you the recall. You can link them."

Connerly has taken no public position on the recall campaign.

Prop. 54 is a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar most state agencies from collecting individual racial and ethnic information. It was not expected to go before voters until the March 2004 primary election, but it was certified this month and had to be included on the next statewide ballot. That turned out to be the Oct. 7 special recall election.

Connerly, who spearheaded passage of Proposition 209, which banned the use of racial preferences in California hiring and university admissions in 1996, said he believes that many Democrats will support Prop. 54 even if they show up to support Davis and vote against the recall.

"This business of classifying people by race, it is crude, it is primitive, " Connerly said. "If most people still believe that the ultimate goal of this nation is a colorblind society, then we need to put the foot to the pedal and make it happen."

Connerly said the decision last week to hold an election on Oct. 7 "caught us a little bit unprepared," and will not allow him to raise as much money as he wanted for the campaign. But his opponents are also in the same position, he said.

A Field Poll released last Wednesday showed voters supporting the initiative, 50 percent to 29 percent.

Affirmative action supporters, meanwhile, see Prop. 54 as the latest attack by Connerly on UC admission policies and say they will mobilize against it. UC adopted a new admissions policy in 2001 that allows campuses to rate undergraduate applicants not only on academics but also on their socioeconomic status and the adversity they had to overcome. Connerly and his allies feared that it would become a way to give extra weight to minority candidates.

His new initiative would no longer allow the university to ask about applicants' race.

"He is trying to be the one-man anti-civil rights campaign. The new civil rights movement is going to take him on," said Yvette Felarca, a UC Berkeley graduate student and a national organizer for the pro-affirmative action group,

By Any Means Necessary.

Thomas Wood, executive director of the conservative California Association of Scholars and co-author of Prop. 209, said affirmative action foes are split on the latest proposition.

Wood said that data on race should be collected as long as it is salient in American life. If Prop. 54 passes, he said, it would be impossible to enforce Prop. 209 because there would be no racial data about students who were or were not admitted.