South Dakota’s $350,000 long-shot Senate campaign

WATERTOWN, S.D. — When Senate candidate Larry Pressler walks into a campaign event, chances are he’ll recognize some of the faces assembled before him.

That’s what tends to happen when barnstorming a state of 800,000 people where Pressler was, for decades, a political fixture.

In a Hampton Inn conference room on Oct. 24, the former and aspiring senator thanked a farmer for taking time away from the cornfields to attend. He warmly greeted the son of the man who used to run his old Senate office in Rapid City. He cheerfully introduced everyone to a former teammate on his swimming team at the University of South Dakota in the early 1960s.

Pressler appears to be hoping that good will from days gone by and some good old-fashioned retail politicking can buoy him and substitute for what he doesn’t have: campaign cash.

In one of the more unusual Senate candidacies in the country, Pressler — who served as a Republican in Congress for two decades, first in the House in the 1970s and then in the Senate for three terms — is mounting a long-shot, independent bid to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat, the man who defeated him in 1996. He’s locked in a four-way battle with Republican former Gov. Mike Rounds, Democrat Rick Weiland and ultraconservative fellow independent Gordon Howie.

Far-fetched bids for higher office are nothing new in U.S. politics. What is surprising is how far Pressler has been able to get with so little, spending a meager $335,000 on the effort, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. In comparison, front-runner Rounds has shelled out $4.1 million, and Weiland has burned through $1.6 million, not including money spent by outside groups.

An early October poll found Pressler surging to second place with 32 percent, nipping at the heels of Rounds, who has 35 percent. Subsequent polls have shown Pressler’s support rapidly falling, down to 13 percent, but he said he is trying his best to drown out the naysayers. After all, he can’t afford internal pollsters anyway.

“We don’t know how it’s going, because we don’t have any polls,” he said. “But I just keep on going.”

Pressler’s central pitch to voters is that he would shun special interests and an official party to be an independent problem solver in Congress, restoring some bipartisanship to a body that been increasingly lacking it since he left almost 20 years ago. In an election year when Democratic candidates won’t admit to having voted for President Barack Obama, Pressler is a departure. He counts himself a “personal friend” of the president’s, while noting that he has given money to former GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Pressler has vowed to serve only one term so he can forgo fundraising and devote all his energies to legislating.

“Running as an independent, I want to get there not encumbered in a caucus and not encumbered with special interests,” he said. “It would be a glorious job. The problem with being a United States senator is that today’s senators spend 52 percent of their time raising money, and I won’t have to do that.”

It turns out that in an era of big-money politics and mind-boggling sums of cash being spent on staffers, consultants, television advertising, mailers and all the other bells and whistles of modern campaigns, a shoestring operation can resonate with some voters.

“You throw so much money, you’re going to get some mud on yourself. Larry has been very good at not throwing much money. He’s kept himself clean,” said Gordon Garnos, 78, Pressler’s former college teammate. “The money doesn’t impress a lot of people here.”

Still, Garnos said he has committed to voting for Rounds next week. “Going to Congress should be a young man’s sport,” he said. “Larry’s had his moment in the sun.”

On the campaign trail, Pressler often appears like a relic. His coffers are stretched so thin that he readily admits that he serves as the “candidate, the campaign manager and the press secretary.” His wife, Harriet Pressler, shuttles him around the state and is the volunteer accountant. He has exactly one full-time staffer and two part-time employees, in addition to a smattering of volunteers. Because he can’t afford to print yard signs and bumper stickers, he has taken to urging his supporters to make their own versions.

In the absence of mailers and big television buys, he rises early every morning so he can go to coffeeshops to strike up impromptu conversations, many of them about some of his zanier policy ideas — like getting a poet laureate appointed from South Dakota and closing down “obsolete” World War II military bases so troops can be brought home to defend the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’ll tell you, I know everybody in the state one step removed,” he said. “Campaigning has been very nice. Harriett is my driver, and we go to a lot of small towns, and we find that a lot of people bring old pictures of me when I was a thin, young man, and I say, ‘Hey, I’ve had my hair frosted since then.’”

Running as a heavily outspent independent comes with its pitfalls, of course. After his surge earlier this month, the national Democratic and Republican Senate campaign committees and outside groups hit the airwaves with ads targeting Pressler. He laments that he doesn’t have the money to respond — and he wouldn’t exactly turn down more cash.

“Well, if anybody wants to send me a contribution, they can go to LarryPressler.com,” he said when asked if his bare-bones campaign is the way he prefers to run.

But in a race in which he and Weiland have railed against the corrosive influence of money in politics, calling for a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to regulate campaign finance, Pressler is the only candidate — whether by choice or not — running without six-figure donations. After having charges of hypocrisy leveled at him, Weiland went so far as to disavow the negative ads being run on his behalf by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, accusing the national organization of plotting to sabotage him in South Dakota.

Meanwhile, Rounds is embroiled in allegations that his administration was involved in the abuse of the federal EB-5 program, which grants visas to immigrants who are willing to invest large sums of money (at least $500,000) in businesses that create American jobs. In South Dakota, officials running the program are suspected of taking a cut of the money for themselves, although Rounds has denied knowledge of the situation and has not been implicated.

“This campaign is very strange. The people that are talking most about taking the big money out are taking it. There is the one candidate that has no big money, and you’re looking at him,” Pressler said. “I feel like the Biblical David, and I’ve got 12 Goliaths coming after me.”

Matt Sawyer, 33, a manager at a diner in Watertown who usually votes Republican, said he was intrigued by Pressler’s idiosyncratic approach.

“I’m disillusioned with both parties. It’s just rhetoric. They don’t do anything or solve anything,” he said. “Republicans and Democrats are more concerned with the letter next to your name, versus the right policies and what’s good for the country.”

Last week, Pressler trotted out retired FBI agent John Good to hammer home his anti-corruption message. Good ran a sting operation in the late 1970s known as Abscam, which tried to lure members of Congress into accepting bribes. Pressler became famous then for being the only elected official to flatly turn down the bribe from agents dressed as Arab businessmen and report the attempt to the proper authorities.

Although the 30-year-old Abscam scandal is now a foggy memory for most, Good said Pressler’s actions during the sting are more relevant than ever, given how the political system functions today.  

“It’s overpowering, the public corruption that is going on. What happened back in the days of Abscam is minor league to what’s going on now,” Good said. “It’s mind-boggling. If you don’t pay, you don’t play.”