From the KKK to the state house: how neo-Nazi David Duke won office

In the 1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he stood for have not gone away

On 21 January 1989, the day after George HW Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for the 81st legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives. Running as a Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John Treen. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster Treen’s faltering campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater declared to the Wall Street Journal.

The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go on to win the runoff vote a month later and enter the state legislature. Over the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office. These subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedevilled the establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in personal and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and represent the crack-up of an old order?