"I was running in a district with a lot of bigots"

The campaign manager of a Democrat who challenged U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana tipped off a blogger that the Republican lawmaker had spoken to a white supremacist group in 2002.

However, Democrat Gilda Reed did not expose the meeting during the 2008 special election for the House seat because she believed it would not sway the district’s conservative electorate.

“I felt strongly that it would not have walked,” Reed told Reuters on Wednesday. “I was running in a district with a lot of bigots.”

She lost to Scalise by more than 50 points.

Reed’s son and 2008 campaign manager, Robert Reed, alerted left-leaning blogger, Lamar White Jr., who broke the story that has caused turmoil for Scalise, the No. 3 Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives.