Accentuate the Negative: Contemporary Congressional Campaigns

Abstract

Campaigning in the final days before Oregon's special Senate election in January 1996, Democratic nominee Rep. Ron Wyden was introduced at each event with a song written in 1944 and recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive … E-lim-in-ate the negative…”The sudden enthusiasm with which Wyden embraced his new theme song struck more than a few Oregonians as ironic. Wyden had adopted his positive campaign posture after reading polls that showed a plurality of voters more concerned about the negative tone of the campaign than about any other issue. That negative tone had largely been established by Wyden himself (Wells 1996).The Wyden campaign—both on the attack and on the defensive, in repentance and in victory—offers a microcosm for the state of campaigning for Congress in the mid-1990s.Wyden, an eighth-term member from Portland, won his Senate nomination in November over another House Democrat from a more rural district who was unable to raise comparable amounts of cash. His Republican rival, state Senate President Gordon Smith, had made himself wealthy in food-packaging and won the nomination by heavily outspending two statewide officeholders (Gruenwald 1995).