On this cool Wednesday night at Botski's, a strip-mall sports bar in Sioux Falls, there are almost as many journalists as there are regulars camped among the barroom tables. Above it all flashes the giant television, showing game four of the National League Championship Series between the Cardinals and the Giants.

Larry Pressler, candidate for U.S. Senate, stands amid a crowd of cameras and microphones, rocking from side to side, reading from a sheet:

All the female tears left dryin',

All the fever and the fight

Are just a small down payment

On the ride he makes tonight.

It's guts and love and glory,

One mortal's chance at fame.

His legacy is rodeo

And cowboy is his name.

Pressler’s part-time press assistant, standing next to me, mouths along with the words. "I was supposed to be a rodeo queen," she later explains.

Behind us all, at the bar, a big man laughs loudly at something else. "Shh!" the female bartender says, slapping him on the arm, hard.

Pressler also read from "Take Care of Your Friends," by Baxter Black, a cowboy poet. Later, after most of the other journalists were gone, Pressler explicated it for me.

"I happen to be a friend of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney," Pressler said. "All the Republicans have received a letter that says, 'A ha! [Pressler] is a fan of Barack Obama, therefore he should not be elected.' While the Democrats have received a letter that says, 'A ha! He is a fan of Mitt Romney.' It's ridiculous, the point we've reached in Washington, where we can't be friends."

Pressler, who represented South Dakota previously in the U.S. Senate for 20 years as a Republican, is currently running a campaign as an independent (if you couldn't tell) – a campaign that, up until at least a month ago, didn't seem to have much of a chance. But a SurveyUSA poll in September showed that he had climbed 8 points since May. Then, a poll released on October 8th showed Pressler only three points behind the frontrunner, former Governor Mike Rounds, a Republican. With 18 days left until the election, and the power balance of the U.S. Senate on the line, the national press corps had gathered at Botski's on Sycamore Street to hear Pressler read cowboy poetry.

The Democratic apparatus, meanwhile, has begun to hit hard at frontrunner Rounds – who did not take part in a candidate forum earlier that afternoon – airing ads calling him out for his connection to South Dakota's EB-5 program, which has been mired in a complex scandal involving corruption and misuse of funds. Rounds' absence at events like these has arguably only made it harder for him to address EB-5. Meanwhile, the Democratic ads leave the door open for either Pressler or a third candidate, Democrat Rick Weiland.

Chris Kissel, KSOO

Weiland has made himself a liberal hero by vowing to reverse the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited corporate campaign contributions. But Pressler speaks of himself as part of a new class of independent centrists (a sentiment that happens to work pretty well with the whole cowboy poetry motif).

"I think the time of the Independent has arrived," Pressler told a group of reporters who had gathered around him. "The Centrist Project... hopes to have a moderate coalition of four to six, including [Sen. Susan] Collins of Maine, maybe Sen. [Mark] Kirk of Illinois. So, there may well be a centrist caucus in the Senate."

The earlier candidate forum had also included Weiland, who has stayed neck and neck with Pressler, and Gordon Howie, a former state senator and free-market conservative. Pressler had flaunted his independent credentials.

At one point during the forum, Pressler's cell phone rang. Howie quipped: “You better get that – it’s probably Barack."

Pressler's run none of his own ads, and says he's raised only one percent of what other candidates in the race have raised, including a $100,000 bank loan he took out himself. He only has one full-time staffer, plus two part timers and a driver – who is also his wife.

Back at the bar, Calvin Welbig, in t-shirt and Minnesota Vikings cap, sat sipping a beer with a couple of friends. Welbig works at Botski's part time. I asked him what he thought of Pressler; he said he wasn't sure. What would Pressler have to say to earn his vote?

Welbig is concerned the federal government is losing focus on domestic issues by continuing to send the military to the Middle East. "We need to take care of more issues over here, in South Dakota, before we head over there," Welbig said. "Better wages. Better health care." His friend nodded.

Both issues had been discussed at the earlier forum. Pressler and Weiland spoke in favor of a higher minimum wage; Weiland supports a kind of revamped single-payer health care model, while Pressler said he sent Obama a letter and asked him to come to South Dakota to "work on" Obamacare.

Elsewhere in the room, Pressler read from "A Cowboy's Prayer" by Charles Badger Clark, South Dakota's first poet laureate: "Make me... Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains/ Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze."