Deirdre Shesgreen and Paul Singer

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — What is Sen. Roy Blunt’s home address?

The Missouri Republican says he lives in a condominium on John Q Hammons Parkway in Springfield, Mo.

But USA TODAY reviewed various financial and legal documents Blunt has filed since he got remarried in 2003 and found the answer is not quite that simple. Those documents show he has claimed a gamut of other addresses as his residence. They include a campaign office, his Springfield congressional office, and the house he shared in Washington with his wife.

Blunt is in a tough re-election race. A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday showed him holding the narrowest of leads over Democratic challenger Jason Kander, the Missouri secretary of state. Democrats have hounded Blunt over his D.C. domicile as he fights to keep his Senate seat.

The questions around Blunt's residence are sensitive because he is married to a Washington lobbyist, Abigail Blunt, head of government relations for Kraft Heinz Co. Her job is in D.C. and they have a son who attends school in Washington.

It was after their 2003 wedding — when Blunt was still in the House of Representatives — that he began renting out his Missouri residence. At that time, he owned a condo in the Branson area. His financial disclosure forms indicate he earned between $5,000 and $15,000 annually in rent.

Also in 2003, Blunt took out a mortgage on the Branson condo and listed his congressional office in Springfield as his mailing address. On the financial disclosure forms he filed with the House covering calendar years 2002-2005, Blunt listed a post office box for his campaign office in Springfield as his address.

Blunt sold the Branson condo in January 2006, shortly after purchasing a new condo in Springfield on John Q Hammons Parkway. When he took out a mortgage on that property in 2009, he listed his address as the home the couple shared in Washington, D.C.

Burson Snyder, deputy campaign manager for Blunt, said the senator lives in Missouri but "has to be in Washington for work." He rented his condo through a "nightly rental program" only when the Blunts knew they were going to be in Washington, Snyder said.

Why would Blunt put his congressional office and the D.C. house on legal documents?

“He had to be in Washington for all or part of the work week for much of the year in order to do his job,” said Snyder. “It does not surprise me, and it should not surprise you, that he had a sensitive legal document mailed to him where he knew he would be due to professional commitments.”

“Do you not ever have important documents sent to you at work or elsewhere?” Snyder said.

Blunt’s Missouri voter file shows he has voted absentee 23 times and in person 14 times since 2003, with his absentee ballots sent to a variety of addresses. On some occasions he had ballots sent to the John Q Hammons address; on others, he had the ballots sent to him in Washington or to his congressional office in Springfield.

Snyder said Blunt frequently votes absentee because the Senate is often in session on Tuesdays, when elections are typically held. “Missourians have sent Roy Blunt to Washington to be their senator — and that means casting their vote on the Senate floor on Tuesdays, even if there is a local election at home,” she said.

Kander regularly casts the incumbent senator as a creature of Washington. “Washington has become his home,” Kander said when he kicked off his campaign last year. And the Missouri Democratic Party has called him a “Washington resident who moonlights” as Missouri’s senator, saying he “spends the minimum amount of time possible in the state.”

To be a Missouri resident, individuals must have their “home of record” in the state, maintain a permanent place of residency here, and spend more than 30 days in the state in the preceding year, according to the state Department of Revenue. If someone’s home of record is elsewhere, they can still be a Missouri resident if they maintain a permanent place of residency in Missouri and spend more than 183 days in the state in the preceding year.

Blunt’s campaign shrugs off the Democrats' accusations.

“He has to be in Washington for work,” said Snyder said. “That also means he has to have a place to sleep at night and that, even when he is home in Missouri on weekends or during congressional breaks, he may not get home to Springfield every night — Missouri is a big state.”

Where in the world is Sen. Roy Blunt? All around Springfield for the next few days

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There’s no question that Blunt gets back to Missouri frequently. He prides himself on having visited all the state’s 114 counties three times since launching his first Senate bid in 2009. And as the 2016 campaign cranked up this summer, Blunt launched a 100-stop bus tour of Missouri.

But when that August campaign blitz was over, Blunt was spotted on a Sunday afternoon at a farmer’s market in the upscale Washington neighborhood where he and his wife share a home with their young son. Blunt's weekend grocery outing in Washington came as other senators facing tough re-elections remained in their home states, pressing the flesh with constituents.

Asked whether his return to D.C. signaled that he was coming “home” after the Missouri tour, Snyder said: “This question has to be a joke. You know that Roy Blunt held more than 100 public events in Missouri during the congressional district work period.”

How much time lawmakers spend in their home states — and whether they’ve “gone Washington" — is frequent fodder for campaign attacks. Some lawmakers, including Rep. Billy Long, rent apartments near their Capitol Hill offices. Some sleep in their congressional offices. Others opt to invest in pricey Washington real estate; in 2014, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and her husband sprung for a $2.7 million downtown condo.