McGovern displayed the political resiliency he had shown in the past. In the 1974 U.S. Senate elections, McGovern faced possible political peril because of his having neglected the state during his long presidential campaign, and by May 1973, he had already begun campaigning for reelection. An Air Force pilot and Medal of Honor recipient, Leo K. Thorsness, had just been repatriated after six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam; he publicly accused McGovern of having given aid and comfort to the enemy and of having prolonged his time as a POW. McGovern replied that if there had been no war, there would have been no POWs, and that everything he had done had been toward the goal of ending the war sooner. Thorsness became the Republican nominee against McGovern, but despite the two men's different roles in it, the war did not become a significant issue. Instead, the campaign was dominated by farm policy differences and economic concerns over the 1973–75 recession. Thorsness charged McGovern with being a "part-time senator" more concerned with national office and with spending over $2 million on his re‑election bid, while McGovern labeled Thorsness a carpetbagger owing to his having grown up in Minnesota. In a year in which Democrats were advantaged by the aftereffects of the Watergate scandal, McGovern won re-election in November 1974 with 53 percent of the vote.