BATON ROUGE, La.—A quarter century after his credible run for governor of Louisiana rattled the national political establishment, white supremacist David Duke has jumped into the crowded competition for a U.S. Senate seat in his home state, receiving rebuke from Republicans who don’t want him running on a ballot as a member of their party.
Duke—once an avowed Nazi sympathizer who headed a Ku Klux Klan group—fell back into relative obscurity after losing a 1991 runoff to scandal-scarred Democrat Edwin Edwards.
A follow-up presidential run from Duke went nowhere, and 10 years later, he pleaded guilty to bilking supporters in 2002 and spent a year in federal prison, although he later declared he did nothing wrong. He had occasional run-ins with authorities in Europe, such as the time he was detained by Czech authorities in 2009 on suspicion of denying the Holocaust.
