Pennsylvania

There's no tougher audience than a roomful of incarcerated veterans who've endured two hours of bloviating academics, judges and wardens. By the time Joe Sestak stood to speak, the wooden pews of the chapel at Graterford Prison had thinned. The lunch call came a half hour earlier and the 70 or so men who remained were sacrificing cafeteria privileges.

The retired Navy admiral sat alongside them through the Veterans Day speeches, occasionally leaning in to commiserate with the men beside him in brown D.O.C uniforms. When it was finally his turn, Sestak bolted up and politely waved off the microphone and the podium. "I thank you because that's more than this country has ever done for you," Sestak said, in a near-shout over the din of floor and wall fans recirculating the chapel's stale, hot air.

Some of the men, particularly the older ones, nodded along as the onetime U.S. congressman paced the aisle in jeans and a fatigue-green flight jacket emblazoned with the George Washington Battle Group he commanded during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His hands, like his feet, kept moving, adding kinetic energy to his words about drug sentencing, prison reform and PTSD.

Most of the men already knew about Sestak's 2016 run for the U.S. Senate, but the candidate failed to mention it in this particular stump speech. Afterward, he quipped amiably: "It wouldn't have helped much here."

Sestak has visited a prison every Veterans Day for nearly a decade, even after losing to the now-incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey in the Republican wave election of 2010. And each year, the men continue to send him a formal invitation. "I don't want them to think I've forgotten them," Sestak said.