AUGUSTA — Rick Bennett still isn’t done with his 1994 congressional race against incumbent John Baldacci. In that surprisingly close 2nd District congressional race, Democrat Baldacci won by only 11,861 votes over his Republican challenger from Norway.

Bennett, now the state Senate minority leader, still bristles over last-minute “push polling” telephone calls to voters that hinted he defaulted on a $10,000 student loan and sponsored a bill to gut the budget of the Attorney General’s Office so that “murderers would go free.”

A push poll is a form of negative campaigning that pretends to be a scientific survey but is really a ploy designed to push voters into voting for or against a particular candidate or issue.

Bennett said the allegations made in the push poll during his campaign “were total falsehoods. Was it harmful? You bet.”

On Thursday, Baldacci’s office denied any connection with the push poll in 1994. Spokesman Doug Dunbar said Baldacci has always run “entirely positive campaigns” and has never condoned push polling.

Bennett’s bill, LD 1257, to regulate push polling passed the Senate on Wednesday night by 13-9 and the House on Thursday by 69-62 in first reading. But it was quickly tabled in the House for additional action, making its survival uncertain.

The Bennett bill was one of the last, if not the last, bill which came to the floor. The sponsor said, “I have no idea” why the bill was held until the closing hours of the session. “It appears that one party wants disclosure and one party does not,” he said. The Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee vote, along party lines, recommended against the Bennett bill.

Like any radio television or newspaper political advertisement, push polling should require a disclosure about who is paying for the calls, the senator said. His bill would not affect regular political polling, just those efforts that attempt to influence voters by “loaded questions and negative information, smeared under the cloak of anonymity and the guise of a poll. As a victim of a smear campaign, I say let’s end the masquerade,” Bennett told his senate colleagues.

Political attacks and slander are nothing new, Bennett said. But with anonymous push polling, the candidate has no opportunity to refute charges. He called push polling “demeaning and belittling and just the thing that keeps good people from running for office.”

The bill has been attacked as unenforceable and as a violation of free speech. It is neither, Bennett said. The bill would be enforced as is any other political campaign law, he said. Most people don’t violate the law, and most political organizations do not want a violation of state law on their record. There is no freedom of speech issue since it does not outlaw the technique, but only requires disclosure of who is paying for the calls and whether the effort is authorized by the candidate, Bennett said.

The Bennett-Baldacci race was featured in a political campaign book called “Dirty Little Secrets,” which devoted a chapter on push polling titled “Reach Out and Slime Someone.” Bennett provided excerpts from the book Thursday. Authors Larry Sabato and Glen Simpson said push polling “has become the rage in American campaigns, to the detriment of both civility and the truth. Unless aggressive action is taken, this difficult-to-catch form of political sleaze threatens to drag our already debased electioneering even lower.”

“The push poll operates under the guise of legitimate survey research to spread lies, rumors, and innuendo about candidates. Hundreds of thousands, probably millions of voters were push polled during the 1994 elections,” the book states.

The book examined the Baldacci-Bennett race and the effects of push polling. The polling was reported by Scott Landry of Wilton, a Democrat and Baldacci supporter, who was “enraged” about the procedure, authors said.

Baldacci told the authors that he never approved the polling. “The Democratic Party decided they could run the race better than the candidate and his campaign,” he is quoted as saying in the book. “They tried to browbeat us into going negative and we wouldn’t do it. We don’t know anything. In their minds, John Baldacci is some hick from rural Maine.”

The authors concluded that “only a sharp, sustained rebuke from the press and an informed public bent on punishing the perpetrators, can stop the swift spread of this clearly sleazy campaign cancer.”