Part of Pryor’s pitch is stylistic: He has an easy-going demeanor and projects himself as a politician willing to talk to just about anybody, a contrast from the hard-liner Cotton, who has the ability to fire up his base.

But Pryor clearly has his work cut out for him. Like few other candidates in the country, Cotton has managed to unite the neoconservative and tea party wings of the GOP — largely because of his hawkish foreign policy positions and his no-compromise brand of conservatism. And after winning his first race last year for the House seat once occupied by Pryor’s father, Republicans began courting the Harvard law graduate to challenge the senator, knowing that Cotton’s military service in Iraq and Afghanistan would make him an appealing candidate.

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reset Michael Bloomberg guns group targets Mark Pryor

The demographics in Arkansas give Pryor unique challenges. Unlike other states with heavy Latino populations, less than 7 percent of the state is Hispanic, meaning there may be little political upside for supporting this year’s immigration bill; and while the 16 percent of the state’s population that is African-American exceeds the national average, some polls have shown Pryor underperforming with blacks.

And while polls show the race tight, some surveys also say that when voters learn Pryor was an Obamacare supporter, they are less inclined to vote for him. This was the same dynamic that doomed Lincoln in 2010, and as the law is being implemented, businesses in Arkansas are now complaining about the rising health care costs, including $10 million of additional costs Arkansas-based food giant Tyson will have to incur next year because of the new law.

But Pryor insists the intensity of the issue has subsided since the Lincoln race — and that Lincoln also faced a costly primary fight that Pryor doesn’t have to worry about. Moreover, she was slammed with abandoning the state after relocating her young family to the Washington area.

“I don’t know how to say this other than to just say it, is, I live in Arkansas,” Pryor said when asked about the differences between him and Lincoln. “I’m here every weekend. I’ve tried very hard to stay in touch with people.”

On top of that, Pryor believes the Obamacare issue will be neutralized after the GOP-led Legislature passed legislation to comply with the Medicaid expansion under the federal law. John Burris, a 27-year-old state congressman and top political adviser to Cotton’s campaign, was the co-author of the law dubbed in the state as the “private option.” Now, there’s a tea party inspired push to repeal the state law via a 2014 ballot referendum.

“It couldn’t be that bad of a vote if the Republican state Legislature just adopted it in our state,” Pryor said of Obamacare.

Cotton aides rejected the comparison.

“When he cast the deciding vote for Obamacare, Mark Pryor voted to force Arkansas to expand a broken Medicaid system or lose all Medicaid funding,” Brasell said. “If he doesn’t understand that, Mark Pryor still hasn’t read the law.”

For Pryor, some of his challenges are rooted in the fact that he has not run a real campaign since his first Senate run in 2002 against Republican Tim Hutchinson because he had no GOP opponent last time around. So he’ll have reintroduce himself to voters, even if his family has been part of the political scene in Arkansas for more than five decades.

“Six years is a long time to go between elections,” he said, “but 12 is a really long time.”

Pryor’s father was already a presence in the political world at the time Mark Pryor was born in Fayetteville near the heart of the University of Arkansas campus, where the younger Pryor would later complete his undergraduate and law degrees and even work part-time washing dishes at a sorority house to pay his bills.

The younger Pryor got a whiff of politics in 1984 when he took a semester off college to stump for his father on the campaign trail, during a hard-fought victory over Republican Ed Bethune.

“That was the year we had [Ronald] Reagan on the ballot, and everybody was like, ‘The Democratic Party is done in Arkansas,’” Pryor said. “I guess for those of us who were here, we’ve heard that for so long.”

And in some ways Pryor — who served as the state’s attorney general before winning his Senate seat in 2002 — is still benefiting from his family name.

“Just last night for example, I talked to a guy, he said, ‘I’m for Mark Pryor. Not because of David Pryor. But for Edgar Pryor,” he said, referring to his late grandfather, who was a county sheriff in Southern Arkansas.

In this campaign, Pryor expects to see his father on the stump — and he wouldn’t be surprised to see Bill Clinton either. Already, Clinton has been to Little Rock for a spring fundraiser where he helped Pryor rake in more than $1 million.

Pryor will certainly need the cash. What voters have seen of late has been more than $1 million in blistering attack ads launched against Pryor since February — from the left, attacking his gun vote, and the right, tying him to Obama — a sign of how the state is prepared for the most expensive race it has ever witnessed.

The attacks from the left came via a six-figure ad buy from Bloomberg, who slammed Pryor’s vote against expanding background checks on commercial gun sales, forcing Pryor to respond with his own TV ad. The fallout from the vote forced Pryor to privately reach out to his Democratic critics back home, including the black caucus in the state Legislature where he laid out his line of thinking in a private meeting in Little Rock.

Still, he said he’s had little problem raising money despite Bloomberg’s calls to cut him off, saying it “probably” has boosted his cash flow instead.

“We have more guns in the state than we have people,” Pryor said, referring to the state’s population of 3 million. Asked how many guns he owned, Pryor paused and quizzed an aide before tallying up the number.

“I have less than 20,” he said. “I probably have nine to 12 guns.”

Still, Pryor voted to reinstate the assault weapons ban in 2004, something that will be fodder for his critics even though he opposed this year’s version of the bill.

But on some social issues, Pryor seems to line up with religious conservatives here. He’s one of the handful of Senate Democrats who still oppose gay marriage, a position he partially attributes to his devout Christian faith. In 2008, his religious beliefs were ridiculed in the Bill Maher documentary, “Religulous,” where the senator appeared to be questioning the science of evolution. But Pryor is still angry at Maher, saying the liberal comic took his words out of context and conducted the interview on false pretenses.

Asked last week if he believed in evolution, Pryor said: “To me, when I say, ‘believe in’, I don’t know if I’d say I believe in evolution like it’s a matter of faith. … But I accept evolution.”