Pressler Making Huge Strides in South Dakota Comeback Attempt

Making a seemingly improbable political comeback as an independent, former Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota is quickly emerging as one of this year’s biggest election stories.

Pressler’s insurgent candidacy pretty much answers something we were wondering about here at Uncovered Politics more than four years ago.

Though his presidential ambitions were prematurely scuttled shortly after entering the U.S. Senate and boldly announcing his candidacy for the nation’s highest office in 1980 — he unquestionably would have been a hell of a lot better than Reagan and probably every chief executive since — it’s good to see him back in the arena.

From the old Non-Partisan League’s colorful “Big Bill” Langer during the Great Depression to the late George S. McGovern and Byron Dorgan in our own time, the Dakotas have always produced some pretty good people, not to mention some of our most principled politicians.

Larry Pressler is a product of that tradition.

Unlike most of today’s lawmakers, Pressler’s campaigns were never bankrolled by the special interests — or wealthy contributors. In fact, during his first campaign for Congress in the Watergate year of 1974, he surprisingly captured his party’s nomination while spending only $3,100.

You read that correctly. Relying almost exclusively on old-fashioned door knocking and plenty of shoe leather, Pressler spent a paltry $3,100 to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives.

According to a recent SurveyUSA poll conducted for the Aberdeen American News, KSFY-TV in Sioux Falls and KOTA-TV in Rapid City, the former three-term Republican senator is polling a remarkable 25 percent in his bid to regain the U.S. Senate seat he lost narrowly to Democrat Tim Johnson in 1996.

Johnson, who has held the seat ever since, is retiring after his current term.

To the surprise of many, the 72-year-old Pressler trails Democratic rival Rick Weiland by only three percentage points according to the SurveyUSA poll and — with seven weeks remaining in the campaign — is within striking distance of Republican frontrunner Mike Rounds, a former two-term governor. Rounds is currently polling at 39 percent.

Gordon Howie, a former state legislator who is also running as an independent, snared three percent of the vote in the SurveyUSA poll. Howie, 65, is president and founder of a Tea Party-affiliated group called Citizens for Liberty. A fiscal conservative, he believes Rounds is too moderate.

Ironically, Howie’s presence in the four-cornered contest, mostly coming at the expense of the GOP frontrunner, could ultimately help propel Pressler — the real moderate in the race — to a stunning come-from-behind victory on Nov. 4th.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, Pressler — unlike either of his major-party opponents — appears to have support across the political spectrum, with 21 percent of the state’s Republicans and 29 percent of Democrats supporting his candidacy. Moreover, 31 percent of the state’s independents, comprising more than one-sixth of the state’s electorate, prefer Pressler to either Rounds or Weiland.

Pressler, whose message of ending the poisonous partisanship in Washington is obviously having an effect with South Dakota voters, was recently endorsed by Charles Whelan’s Centrist Project, a relatively new political action committee aimed at eliminating partisanship from national politics.

Sensing that an upset victory could be in the offing, Pressler recently took to the airwaves with a $50,000 statewide television buy last month featuring the late Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News coverage of the South Dakota lawmaker’s refusal to accept a bribe during the Abscam scandal in that late 1970s — an FBI sting operation in which seven members of Congress, including a U.S. Senator, were implicated in criminal wrongdoing.

More recently, the former senator has been running additional television spots highlighting his ability to work with both Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic President Bill Clinton.

As of June 30th, Pressler had raised a relatively modest $107,000 for his comeback bid, more than half of which came in the form of loans from the candidate himself. In practical political terms, he’s a mere pauper — just like the majority of South Dakotans when compared with those in the Washington Beltway, those whose standard-of-living didn’t suffer during the recent “Great Recession.”

By contrast, ex-Gov. Rounds — supported lavishly by the RNC and other Washington insiders — had reportedly raised $3,447,000 as of the end of June, while Democratic aspirant Rick Weiland raised nearly $1.1 million.