“It didn’t work for me, but it just didn’t work for the process,” Anderson said. “It’s no-win. If I had to do it over again, I think I’d call the legislature into special session and give them a chance to change the law to provide for an election.”

Anderson also ran into an unforeseeable complication in his 1978 election bid. Fellow Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, the state’s senior senator and former vice president, died in January of that year. His widow Muriel was appointed to the seat, but she did not run in the special election that fall to fill the rest of the unexpired term. That left Democrats defending both seats at once, with the controversy over Anderson’s appointment contributing both to his defeat by Republican Rudy Boschwitz in that year’s regularly scheduled election and Democratic businessman Robert E. Short’s loss to Republican Dave Durenberger in the special election for Humphrey’s seat.

The Republicans also captured the Minnesota governor’s office in 1978, with Albert H. Quie defeating interim Democratic incumbent Rudy Perpich — the man who had moved up from lieutenant governor and appointed Anderson to the Senate.

“You had billboards that the Republicans put up that were surprisingly effective which said that something scary is going to happen to the Democrats: It’s called an election,” Anderson recalled.

He said most of his advisers and aides encouraged him to take Mondale’s Senate seat, with one notable exception.

“His name was Walter Mondale,” Anderson said. “Fritz was appointed attorney general. He was appointed to the U.S. Senate and he was selected to run as vice president. He was an expert on the appointive process ... He was the one saying ‘be careful.’ ”

Voter anger over the process used by a governor to pick a senator — even if it is not a self-appointment — may damage a senator’s chances for winning election on their own.

Sen.-designate Roland Burris, picked by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich to succeed Obama, would have a hurdle to overcome in the method of his selection should he be seated by the Senate and seek election to the seat.

No Experience Necessary — But It May Help

When Nebraska Sen. Ed Zorinsky died in March 1987, David Karnes wasn’t on anyone’s short list to succeed him — except that of newly elected Republican Gov. Kay A. Orr.

Orr conducted interviews with several other potential appointees as she raced to make a selection. But she and her top aide decided to offer the job to Karnes, a former Reagan White House fellow and University of Nebraska swimmer who had no elective experience.

Karnes was given less than a day to consider the offer, during which he spoke with Vice President George Bush and young Republican Sens. Dan Quayle of Indiana and Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

Within hours, he was on the Senate floor voting to send aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

Karnes was hurt in his bid to hold the seat the following year by a primary challenge from then-Rep. Hal Daub, who had hoped to win Orr’s appointment to the seat. Daub campaigned against Karnes as an amateur who hadn’t earned his seat in the Senate.

It was a tough primary and it helped set up a victory for Democrat Bob Kerrey, who served from 1989 to 2001.

“He’s probably the only person who would have been able to win the race at that time,” Karnes said.

He also said experience on the stump is an asset for appointees who try to win election.

“For those people who have been through campaigns, it helps a lot,” he said.

Rare Occurrence

It is rare, but not unheard of, for an appointed senator who hasn’t won an election before to strike gold in his first Senate contest.

Future Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine, was appointed to succeed his former boss, Ed Muskie, in 1980 and won election to the seat in 1982.

However, the mix of inexperience as a winning candidate and an appointment to the Senate has seldom proved to be the right recipe.

Mitchell is the only Senate appointee to win election after having holding no prior public elective office since at least 1958, according to data compiled by Sen. Robert C. Byrd , D-W.Va., and a review of the appointments made since Byrd’s statistical history of the Senate was published in 1993.

The last electoral newcomer to win an appointment and then lose at the ballot box was Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan, who was appointed to the seat her husband Mel won posthumously a plane crash. Carnahan lost to former Rep. Jim Talent.

At least one of the new appointments, Michael Bennet of Colorado, will enter with no prior elective experience. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter has said he will appoint Bennet, the Denver schools superintendent, to succeed Salazar.

Caroline Kennedy, who has been campaigning to persuade New York Gov. David Paterson to give her Clinton’s seat, also has no elective experience.

Famous Names

If she is selected, Kennedy would be the second member of her family to represent New York in the Senate. Her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, ran and won despite being labeled a “carpetbagger” in 1964, the year after Caroline’s father and Robert’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.

It was in that same year another member of President Kennedy’s inner circle, press secretary Pierre Salinger, won appointment to a California Senate seat and then lost the ensuing election.

There were other factors in his loss — which came as fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory — but Salinger, a former San Francisco Chronicle writer, had to counter attacks that he was an outsider because he had been living in Virginia.

John Foster Dulles, who would later become secretary of State and who had been involved in the creation of the United Nations, was appointed to the Senate by New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey in 1949 but lost his bid to keep the seat later that year.