South Dakota Senate candidate Larry Pressler??Dirk Lammers/AP
Larry Pressler, who’s running as an independent in South Dakota’s three-way race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson, has averaged around 23 percent of the vote in polls of the contest, which could determine control of the Senate in 2015. With Election Day less than a month away, former Republican Gov. Mike Rounds and Democrat Rick Weiland are both hoping to siphon off support from the third-party entry. And Pressler, who represented South Dakota in the Senate as a Republican from 1979 to 1997, is beginning to take his lumps. On Friday, Politico reported that he lists his primary residence in Washington, DC. But Pressler isn’t just a casual DC resident—he’s a self-described townie who briefly floated a run for mayor. Here’s the Associated Press in 1998, on Pressler’s bid to replace Democrat Marion Barry:
Pressler, now a lobbyist, was not immediately available for comment.
But he told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, that he has written a three-point agenda, including a private-school voucher program and a “real tax cut” to stimulate economic development in Washington.
“I have lived in DC since 1971, longer than anyone else who’s running,” Pressler said.
Despite hailing from a state that has relatively few blacks, Pressler told the newspaper said he could connect with Washington’s blacks. The district is 65 percent black.
“I have a lot of African American friends,” he said.
That’s sort of the Trinity of archival dirt—a lobbyist epithet, an affirmation of DC residency, and an awkward boast about black friends. You don’t see it very often.
Pressler quickly gave up on the idea of running for mayor, but not before the Washington City Paper‘s Michael Schaffer dug up this exquisite anecdote about the former senator:
Marching out of a committee hearing a couple years ago, Pressler mistook a closet door for the exit. After initially trying to wait out his colleagues, he finally realized that the hearing wasn’t going to end any time soon. He walked back out of the closet, waved as if he’d been talking to someone inside, and left the chamber.
