WASHINGTON _ It's been nearly 30 years since David Duke won his only political race, but news that he's considering a run for the House against Majority Whip Steve Scalise got a lot of attention.
It's not the first time that Duke has floated the idea of running against Scalise _ he floated the idea early last after Scalise was forced to apologize for "a mistake I regret" in speaking in 2003 to a white supremacist group founded by Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Duke called Scalise a "sellout" and called for him to resign his seat and said he was thinking about running against him.
"I'm definitely going to consider it because it's so disgusting to me to see ... he got elected on false pretenses," BuzzFeed reported at the time.
Duke said that it was the ambush on police in Dallas that killed five officers that compelled him to think about running again. A statement on his website said that Duke had been encouraged by "enormous numbers of people" in his district to run.
"With the country coming apart at the seams and no one willing to really speak the truth about what is happening, the majority population in this country needs someone who will actually give voice to their interests in the face of an increasingly violent hatefest launched by the media and political establishment against them," the statement said.
Duke has a losing record in politics.
After two unsuccessful bids for the Louisiana state Senate in the 1970s, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, finishing with 4 percent of the vote in the primary won by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Failing that, he ran as the Independent Populist candidate for president, getting 1 percent of the vote in Louisiana as George H.W. Bush won the state.
Duke's one win came after he switched his party registration to Republican and won a special election to fill a state House seat in 1989, winning the runoff 51-49 percent.
A year later, he challenged incumbent Sen. Bennett Johnston Jr. but lost 54-43 percent.
Duke's most noted run was his losing bid for governor in 1991 against former Gov. Edwin Edwards, whose terms in the governor's office had been dogged by accusations of corruption.
His candidacy was criticized in Louisiana and nationally, with even then-President George H.W. Bush calling him a "charlatan " and a racist. Opponents pushed Edwards' campaign with a bumper sticker that read "Vote for the Crook, It's Important."
He got 9 percent of the vote in Louisiana's 1992 presidential primary, finishing well behind Bush and Pat Buchanan,
He finished out of the money in the jungle primary for the Senate, eventually won by Mary Landrieu, in 1996, and again in the 1999 on for a House seat, finishing third behind now-Sen. David Vitter and David Treen, who he beat to win his state seat.
