Democratic senator Mark Pryor did not own a home in Arkansas, the state he represents in Washington, during his first four years in the U.S. Senate. And now it appears he lives part-time at the Washington, D.C. home of his brother, a top lobbyist for Microsoft.
Pryor’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Cotton, has come under fire recently for not owning property in the state. The recently married Cotton lives in a house, owned by his family, in Dardanelle, not far from the farm where he grew up and where his parents currently live. Janine Parry, the director of the Arkansas Poll and a professor at the University of Arkansas, told McClatchy News Service that Cotton’s residency was “something the Pryor people are positioned to take advantage of.”
But doing so could invite scrutiny into Pryor’s own residency. In 2002, shortly after his election to the Senate, Pryor and his then-wife purchased a home in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, selling it soon after and purchasing a second home in Arlington. The Pryors sold that home in 2007 for more than $1 million, moved back to Arkansas, and purchased a house in Little Rock, just a year and a half before Pryor’s first reelection campaign. The Democrat divorced his wife in 2012 and now owns a condo unit in Little Rock.
After selling his Arlington home, Pryor appears to have started living with his brother, David Pryor Jr., while in Washington. According to a 2008 profile of Pryor in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the senator “gets to work between 6 and 7 each morning and usually leaves late, grabbing something to eat on the way to his brother’s house near the National Zoo, where he stays in an extra bedroom.” David and his wife purchased the home on Irving Street in northwest Washington in 2000 for around $570,000, and the home is now valued at over $1 million.
A call to Pryor’s reelection campaign to confirm the senator’s D.C. residency has not been returned.
David Pryor is the director of federal government affairs at Microsoft and a registered lobbyist for the company, where he’s been since 2009. Prior to that, he worked as a lobbyist for FedEx. Since 2013, Mark Pryor has chaired the Senate Commerce subcommittee on communications, technology, and the Internet, and many of the issues David Pryor has lobbied on behalf of fall under that subcommittee’s purview.
Pryor’s campaign is one of the top recipients of Microsoft’s political donations for the current cycle, and the Arkansas Democrat has received $15,000 from the Washington-state-based software company so far.
The Pryor brothers’ father is David Pryor, the former U.S. Senator and governor of Arkansas.
