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Helms outspent Hunt; their combined expenditures exceeded $22 million, more than has been spent on any other nonpresidential election. An average of 200 TV spots a day ran in the past month. One recent Helms ad showed his opponent at the National Governors' Conference earlier this year supporting a deficit-reduction resolution; a narrator described the scene as "actual news footage in slow motion of Jim Hunt voting to raise your taxes." The most memorable Democratic ad consisted of pictures of death-squad victims in El Salvador under a sound track of semiautomatic fire; Helms is a patron of Roberto d'Aubuisson, the Salvadoran who has been linked to death squads. That particular connection may prove significant: with the defeat of Senator Charles Percy, Helms could take over the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.
The Reagan landslide clinched it for Helms. Hunt, for his part, failed to get out enough of the black vote. According to an exit poll, Helms won the support of 60% of white North Carolinians; since 87% of the voters hi the poll were white, he did not need a single black vote to win.
Senator Walter D. ("Dee") Huddleston, 58, is a mild-mannered, moderate Democrat hardly known outside Kentucky. He never aroused passions one way or the other. Nor did he ever really worry about his re-election to a third term over a G.O.P. county executive.
The little-known Addison Mitchell ("Mitch") McConnell, 42, is no more flamboyant or ideological than Huddleston, but he is a Republican eager beaver in a Republican year who spent almost as much money as the incumbent. He managed his extremely narrow upset by convincing Kentuckians that their Senator is a flaccid backbencher. Declared McConnell: "I can't think of a single thing that Huddleston has done for Kentucky. No one else can either." McConnell organized weekly derisive "Dope on Dee" seminars. He made much of the fact that Huddleston, the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, missed almost a quarter of this year's 300 roll-call votes. McConnell harped on the Democrat's junketeering with a funny, effective TV ad that purported to show a pack of bloodhounds tracking down Huddleston around the country.
McConnell is a somewhat humorless, hardworking lawyer who served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Ford Administration. Serious even as a Louisville child—he is said to have carried a briefcase in the eighth grade—McConnell has a solid seven-year record managing Jefferson County. He had passed up other statewide offices that seemed more winnable. "He decided to do this 15 years ago," says a friend, Businessman Stephen Linker. "He planned and planned and beat the bushes and he raised money. He's very calculating."