“Hi, I’m Mark Pryor,” the two-term US senator from Arkansas told an elderly couple queueing for their barbecue supper at a church bazaar on a warm Saturday afternoon. “Don’t believe everything you see on TV.”



Such is the humbling lot of a southern Democrat up for re-election in the second term of President Barack Obama and in the age of near-anarchic campaign finance.

The senator is facing a barrage of attack ads tying him to Obama as he scrambles to save his job – and, perhaps, Democratic control of the Senate – from Tom Cotton, a wünderkind first-term Republican congressman, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and graduate of Harvard.

Pryor, 51, who sits in the Senate seat that his father, David, held for 18 years following two terms as Arkansas governor in the 1970s, has endured more airings of TV ads against him than any other Democratic senator facing voters in November, according to his campaign.

He complains bitterly that the sharpest ads have been funded with millions of dollars in so-called “dark money” from nonprofit advocacy groups that need not disclose their donors, nor even how they spend their funds, thanks to a series of US supreme court rulings.

“Pryor, voting with Obama 95% of the time, was the deciding vote for Obamacare,” Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is telling viewers this month. Analysing a similar ad by Americans For Prosperity, the non-profit linked to the Koch brothers, FactCheck.org noted that Pryor “voted against Obama more than any other Senate Democrat last year”.

Pryor claims $15m (£9m) in outside money has been spent against him. The figure is disputed by Cotton, but a Guardian analysis of thousands of pages of contracts struck with Arkansas TV stations found that in the past month alone, at least $3.7m was spent by conservative groups that do not name donors on 6,110 TV ad spots pitched at the Senate race. In the same period, one comparable liberal nonprofit spent $418,860 on 921 spots fighting from the other side.

Polls indicate that after trailing through spring, Cotton has now pulled ahead. Yet a year after he was written off as roadkill, Pryor is staying alive. The pull of personal loyalty, the targeted power of old-fashioned campaign spending and Cotton’s controversial voting record have combined to illustrate the potential limits of political destruction by remote control.

‘Aren’t you the guy from the TV ads?’

The threat to his career posed by outside money nagged at Pryor as he gripped and grinned in the sunny yard of St Mary’s Catholic church in Hattieville, a town of 1,500 about 60 miles north-west of Little Rock. “It’s working as a cancer on the system all over the country,” Pryor told the Guardian. “At a minimum, the people have a right to know who’s behind all this.”

His opponent once thought so too. At Harvard, Cotton wrote in favour of “more extensive disclosure requirements” to ensure that “the public knows who is giving to whom and will thus judge for themselves the relevancy of those donations to their electoral choices”.

“Um, I think that, I mean, disclosure is good. It’s not bad, and it’s good in government, and good in politics,” Cotton told the Guardian when asked why he had changed his mind, after finishing a 5,000m race in his home town of Dardanelle at 7 that morning.

“All I can do is run my campaign based on the rules as they exist today,” said Cotton, 37, who finished the race third in 20 minutes 42 seconds, nine seconds behind the winner, junior-high schooler Jacob Mills, 14. “It’s not like the millions of dollars that have been spent against me by outside groups are as pure and clean as the wind-driven snow.”

Republican challenger Tom Cotton runs a 5k race in Dardanelle, Arkansas. Photograph: Jon Swaine/Guardian Photograph: Jon Swaine/Guardian

About $4.8m has been spent in total by outside groups attacking Cotton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against Pryor from the Cotton camp.

Patriot Majority USA, a liberal non-profit founded by Democratic operatives that spent $418,860 on TV ads in Arkansas in July, had already thrown a total of some $2.6m from unidentified donors at attacks on Cotton. An ad by the group claiming that the congressman backed a plan to destroy Medicare while voting to give Congress “taxpayer-funded healthcare for life” was rated “pants-on-fire” by Politifact. But other outside groups backing the senator, including Senate Majority Pac, which has ties to Senate majority leader Harry Reid and has coughed up $1.4m, do disclose their donors.

“Aren’t you the guy from the TV ads?” a passing man asked Cotton as he did the rounds at the church bazaar later on. “If it was bad, it’s not me!” said the congressman.

Pryor insisted that he could not simply urge the Democratic-leaning Pacs to back down. “It’s unilateral disarmament,” he said, as bazaar-goers lined up for raffle tickets to win a John Deere ride-on lawnmower. “If I say no, then they keep doing their thing.”

In all, conservative outside groups spent at least $4.7m on 7,829 TV ads aimed at the Arkansas Senate race last month, according to the Guardian analysis of contracts, which TV stations have been required to upload to an FCC database since 1 July. They spent 38% more than liberal-leaning groups, which bought up 6,614 spots for $3.4m.

But the biggest ad-buyer of all was Pryor’s own campaign, which spent $2.7m on 6,136 spots in the approach to election day – compared to $849,851 for 1,610 spots bought by Cotton.

And having a greater proportion of funds inside his campaign coffers than in the bank accounts of sympathetic outside groups appears to have allowed Pryor – who has raised 48% more money than Cotton – to deliver better-tailored televised attacks than his opponents.

As things stand, in a reddening state where Mitt Romney beat Obama by more than 23 percentage points in 2012, and Pryor’s colleague Blanche Lincoln lost by 21% to Republican John Boozman in the Tea Party sweep two years before that, Pryor – the last remaining Arkansan Democrat in Congress – trails Cotton by just 2.2 points, according to an average of polls.

Obama, who has an average approval rating of 34% in Arkansas, remains a huge liability. One after another, voters said they were backing Cotton because of the president. Asked if he was proud to be Obama’s colleague, Pryor told the Guardian: “Well, I’m, I’m a, I’m a proud Arkansas Democrat. A very proud Arkansas Democrat.” One of the reasons Arkansans were the best people to represent in Washington, he said, is that “they’re forgiving”.

Professor Janine Parry, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas and director of the Arkansas Poll, said the reliance by Cotton and his allies on Obama and Obamacare as a stick with which to beat Pryor in their TV attacks was showing limitations.

“If you ask people if they like Obamacare, they still say they don’t,” she said. “The reality is that in Arkansas, as well as elsewhere, it’s being implemented and it’s benefiting families, whether they wish to acknowledge that or not.”

Down-ticket Democrats said that while they were careful not to use the O-word when talking about it, the “private option”, the state’s associated expansion of Medicaid, which used federal subsidies to help at least 172,000 poorer people obtain health insurance, was proving quietly popular. Parry sees this as “neutralising some of the vitriol” against the federal overhaul that has torpedoed so many Democrats over the past four years.

Outsiders in Arkansas

Meanwhile, a relentless and early TV assault by Pryor and his allies on Cotton’s votes against the Farm Bill, against making student loans more affordable and for overhauling medicare, are nudging along a “return to bread and butter issues”, said Parry, challenging the Republican.

Cotton rejects this, styling himself as someone as principled and hawkish on public spending as he is on foreign policy, where he has championed Bush’s neo-conservative record, criticised Obama for retreating from military intervention and fiercely attacked Republicans who would restrict US intelligence agencies due to disclosures by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

But this ideological zeal led him to be the only the member of Arkansas’ congressional delegation to oppose the Farm Bill, a piece of legislation crucial for this rural state, because its $8bn in cuts to the food stamp programme were not deep enough. Everyone, Cotton explained, has waited in line at a supermarket beside a food stamp recipient with “steak in their basket, and they have a brand new iPhone, and they’re going out to a brand new SUV”.

He faced still more sharp criticism from the Pryor camp for a frugal vote against federal disaster relief funding before a tornado struck the state earlier this year, killing 16 people.



Pryor aides claim that Running, a TV ad they released almost a year ago, which highlighted some of these votes and noted that Cotton was “running for another office, just seven months after being sworn into Congress”, had helped them define the Republican in the minds of many undecided voters as a young man in a hurry who was unwilling to fight their corner.

For Parry, the strength of Pryor’s line of attack highlights a risk in relying instead on outside and secret spending in a state where, in politics at least, “outsiders are still viewed as somewhat suspect”.

Tom Cotton talks to voters at St Mary’s church in Hattieville, Arkansas. Photograph: Jon Swaine/Guardian Photograph: Jon Swaine/Guardian

“Outside groups may not have a good grasp of the Arkansas political landscape,” she said. “It’s pretty easy to just trot out the trope they’ve been using for the past two election cycles nationally and assume it’ll work here – the plug-and-play approach.” Notoriously, 11 of the 13 Republican Senate candidates backed as part of Crossroads’ $1bn total spend in 2012 lost their elections.

Anyone other than Pryor might still be doomed. “But this race, you have to understand, is just a different playing field,” said Rex Nelson, a former campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, the state’s Republican governor from 1996 to 2007. “Blanche Lincoln didn’t have the deep well of family goodwill that the Pryor family has in Arkansas.”

The open contest has ushered in what Parry calls a “last gasp of retail politics”, running alongside the TV bonanza. “This may ultimately come down to who presents the best case out on the stump, who does best in those appearances, and things we really didn’t think mattered any more,” said Nelson. “There is a certain provincialism – this is a state where people really do still expect the candidates to show up.”

Most agree this favours the incumbent. Pryor’s campaign leapt on Cotton’s failure to attend last month’s Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival, an annual event of outsized importance that was attended by every statewide candidate except the congressman, who reportedly chose instead to visit the Koch brothers’ annual retreat in California.

Then there is the so-called “stiffness” factor to the Republican military man, which has deflated early frenzy about a candidate with a resumé, and even a regular-Joe name, that are almost too good to be true. “Cotton is just not charismatic,” said Parry. “Neither of them is a Huckabee or a Clinton. But the quiet earnestness of Mark Pryor seems to be trumping the perception of reserved arrogance in Tom Cotton.”

“He’s had kind of a bad press for being unapproachable and rigid,” one member of Cotton’s entourage, who was not authorised to speak to the press, said at the church bazaar. “I don’t see that. Maybe he’s a little on a different intellectual level. But I don’t see he’s unapproachable.”

His campaign is seemingly mounting a belated bid to cultivate a homelier image. In a TV ad the campaign released in May, Cotton and Anna Peckham, his wife since March, arrange flowers outside the house in Dardanelle he inherited from his family. “I’ll stay connected to my roots,” he says. “Anna will make sure of that.”

“There was so much hype over him that people tend to forget that this is a first-term House member running his first state-wide race,” said Nelson. “Quite frankly, there are just a lot of Arkansans who don’t know Tom Cotton.”

Still, he appears to hold a lead. And the person who knows him best remains confident. “He’s a very hard worker, willing to put in the work to be successful,” said his mother Avis Cotton, 65. But there is only so much of a bruising Senate campaign that a parent can be expected to take.

“We always DVR the news now,” said Mrs Cotton, “so that we can skip over the ads.”