Prentiss Walker - Political Career

Political Career

Walker's House victory in 1964 was the first Republican breakthrough in Mississippi since Elza Jeffords served in Congress from 1883 to 1885. He unseated 11-term incumbent W. Arthur Winstead by some seven thousand votes. Walker's victory is considered to have been heavily influenced by the campaign of Barry Goldwater, who carried Mississippi in the 1964 presidential election with an unheard-of 87 percent of the vote. Goldwater carried many of the counties in the district with 90 percent of the vote.

Walker gave up his House seat after only one term in 1966 to challenge U.S. Senator James O. Eastland. He ran well to Eastland's right, accusing him of being too friendly to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and of not doing enough to block integration-friendly judges in his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. With 105,652 votes, Walker lost by 27-65 percent. Nonetheless, it was the first credible challenge Eastland had ever faced. Years later, Wirt Yerger, the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party at the time, said that Walker's decision to relinquish his House seat after one term for the vagaries of a Senate race against Eastland was "very devastating" to the growth of the state GOP.

In 1968, Walker challenged G. V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Meridian in a bid to return to Walker's former House seat, but lost by 30-70 percent. Walker ran for the Senate against Eastland in 1972 as an Independent and drew about 14,000 votes. The Republican senatorial nominee that year was Gil Carmichael, an automobile dealer from Meridian, who thereafter in 1975 and in 1979 carried the GOP gubernatorial banner in unsuccessful general election bids.