Tight Senate Race in Oregon Is National Testing Ground

It was barely 27 degrees outside in freezing rain, but inside the ice cream was starting to melt. Vanilla and chocolate streams oozed down the edge of the buckets as an uncertain audience in an old labor hall sat, and shuffled, and listened.

The Roseburg Labor Hall once would have been a friendly place for Ron Wyden, Democratic Senate candidate, and his campaign swing of mid-winter ice cream socials. But with the thick forests of southern Oregon virtually without timber cuts in recent years, local laborers are rethinking their old Democratic alliances. And that has cast in doubt the outcome of a race that is being watched for its national implications.

“It’s been very frustrating as a Democrat, that we just seem to drift,” said Richard Chasm, a real estate agent standing in the hall.

“It used to be the Democrats would stand up and say, ‘We’re for an eight-hour working day.’ Now, all we seem to be saying is, ‘We’re not liberals.’ Or, ‘We’re liberal, but we’re cool.’ We’re always trying to defend ourselves. I really wonder sometimes, do Democrats have a vision? Is there a game plan?”

The race to replace former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood was thought to offer Democrats an early opportunity to cut into GOP control of the Senate. With the state Democratic Party enjoying a seven-point registration edge over Republicans and an anticipated backlash against Packwood’s humiliating resignation in the face of sexual-harassment charges, Wyden, a popular Portland-area congressman first elected in 1980, should have had a relatively easy campaign against Gordon Smith, the one-term state Senate president with a deeply conservative voting record.

Yet as the first major election of 1996 heads to a finish with the close of mail-in balloting Tuesday, the contest is neck and neck, coming to a tense finish in the battlegrounds of Oregon’s declining lumber towns, its tax-strapped middle-class suburbs and a growing urban population fearful of losing the pristine environment that has lured thousands to the Northwest.

The Smith-Wyden face-off has emerged as a key fight for the environmental movement, which has poured more than $200,000 into an independent ad campaign against Smith, portrayed as a renegade polluter at his food-processing plant. The anti-Smith effort marks the first time in the Sierra Club’s 104-year history that it has launched such a campaign in a political race.

The race also echoes the national debate over a balanced federal budget, tax breaks for the middle class, the future of Medicare and abortion rights.

“In many ways, it will be a referendum on the Republican revolution, because [on most issues] you could take out Smith and Wyden’s face and paste somebody else’s in and run them anywhere in the country,” said University of Portland political scientist James Moore. “This will be a real good level to find out which themes are working.”

So far, the mail-in voting process--its first use in a congressional election--seems to be working; as of Saturday, 58% of the 1.8 million ballots sent out early this month had been returned, meaning that the final turnout could set a state record for a nonpresidential election. Voters have until 8 p.m. Tuesday to mail back their ballots or put them in special drop boxes.

The contest is playing out over the patchwork political landscape of Oregon, a state of beards, sandals and bicycles in the cities west of the Cascade Mountains--Wyden’s strongholds--and work shirts and baseball caps in Smith territory, the farmlands and logging towns of the east and south.

They come to a point in the rapidly growing suburbs outside Portland, where young families are both uncomfortable about higher federal taxes and unwilling to see the clean environment that attracted them to Oregon spoiled. The race could ultimately be won or lost in these neighborhoods where party allegiance is weak, said Oregon State University political scientist Bill Lunch.

Smith, a 43-year-old millionaire whose frozen-food processing plant in the eastern Oregon town of Pendleton employs 800 workers, has been motoring across rural Oregon in a heavily placarded motor home in recent days.

His message is one that has strong appeal among these wheat growers, orchard owners and loggers: Send someone from outside the Washington establishment who will fight for term limits, a balanced federal budget, work-for-welfare, a middle-class tax cut.

“People are looking for somebody who can show how government can keep more of its essential promises, who can really change the culture of Washington. If you like how Washington is right now, vote for Ron Wyden,” Smith told two dozen supporters, including the town’s Democratic mayor, in rural Hermiston recently.

Wyden, 46, has been striding through the streets of Portland and Eugene, popping bubble gum, stopping people at random and thrusting campaign fliers in their hands.

With new tracking polls showing him slipping slightly behind, he launched into a virtual 24-hour-a-day campaign, scheduling middle-of-the-night stops at doughnut houses, sports bars, hospitals and fire stations.

At each stop, Wyden stresses a balanced approach to budget-cutting, touting his own proposal for cutting $90 million out of Medicare without jeopardizing key services.

He also has made much of his decision earlier this month to pull all his negative ads. The announcement came amid a groundswell of public distaste in a state unaccustomed to political mud volleys.

But it fell a little flat when it was followed up by two major attacks paid for independently by the Sierra Club and the Teamsters, one scoring Smith for a devastating spill from his factory into a local creek, the other--roundly denounced by Wyden himself--talking about the death of a 14-year-old boy at his plant.

A key factor in the race has been Smith’s transformation in the public eye from a right-wing Republican with one of the state Senate’s most conservative voting records--the message he put out during the GOP primary--to his more recent tone as a moderate businessman who is more interested in deals than ideas.

“The Wyden people got ready to run a campaign against [House Speaker] Newt Gingrich, and Jimmy Stewart showed up,” Moore said.

Smith got another leg up just before the primary in early December, when Wyden was unable to give a correct answer to any of the 10 questions asked during a TV quiz--including queries about Oregon’s largest employer, the price of milk and gas, and the location of Bosnia-Herzegovina on a map.

Smith missed six of the questions, but the key ones, about basic consumer prices, he got right. It has helped him combat Wyden’s repeated remarks about his $2-million-a-year salary.

After contributing about $2 million of his own money, Smith has raised about $1 million more than Wyden and is outspending him 2-to-1 in the homestretch. It is enough to hire phone banks to counter Wyden’s volunteers from senior, environmental and organized labor groups.

“It’s been pretty nerve-racking, because at every point during this 20-day period, somebody’s licking a stamp [for their mail-in ballot], and they probably just saw a Gordon Smith ad,” said David Sandretti, communications director for the state Democratic Party.