Arkansas’s Democratic senator Mark Pryor won’t say why he believes Tom Cotton, the Republican congressman who is challenging him this year, “gives off” a “sense of entitlement” to the Senate seat because of Cotton’s military service. In a recent interview with NBC News, Pryor said, “I think that’s part of this sense of entitlement, that he gives off, that almost is like, ‘I served my country, therefore let me into the Senate.’ That’s not the way it works in Arkansas.”

Cotton, a first-term congressman, is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, serving as an Army captain.