In 1992, when Cranston retired, Herschensohn won the Republican nomination narrowly, defeating U.S. Representative Tom Campbell, a more moderate Republican who had been on the faculty of Stanford University and who had been elected to Zschau's former Congressional seat. Herschensohn received 956,136 votes (38.2 percent) to Campbell's 895,970 (35.8 percent). The remaining 417,848 ballots (16.7 percent) went to Mayor Sonny Bono of Palm Springs, also a relative moderate. During the primary campaign and afterwards, Herschensohn became a close friend of Bono and encouraged his former rival to seek election to the United States House of Representatives in 1994.[citation needed]
Herschensohn lost the 1992 general election to the Democratic Party nominee Barbara Boxer, but received over one million votes more than the Republican presidential ticket of George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle received in California during the same election.[a] Herschensohn won more votes than any losing Senate candidate had ever gotten at the time, topping the count of Leo McCarthy (D-CA) in 1988. His record wasn't broken until Elizabeth Emken topped it in the 2012 California Senate race.
^Dershowitz, Alan M. (1998). The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century. Simon & Schuster. pp. 158–159. ISBN978-0-684-84898-3. ...Jews who came to the defense of the Christian right – including ... Bruce Herschensohn ... are among our most extreme political conservatives...