Floyd Spence - Electoral History

Electoral History

After law school, Spence was soon elected as a Democrat to represent Lexington County in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He was reelected in 1958 and 1960, but on April 14, 1962, Spence announced that he was switching to the Republican Party, having become uncomfortable with the national Democrats' increasingly liberal platform. He also opposed a loyalty oath required by South Carolina Democrats. On the same day, he announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for the state's 2nd congressional district, based in Columbia. He had been urged by several friends to run before his switch, especially after the death of its previous congressman, John J. Riley, but declined. Spence faced the Democratic nominee, fellow state representative Albert W. Watson of Columbia. Watson won his party nomination with 51.8 percent of the vote over Frank C. Owens, the former mayor of Columbia and the choice of party regulars. Watson then defeated Spence with 52.8 percent of the general election vote. In the 1962 race, Watson carried the support of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, the former governor who had run for president in 1948 as the nominee of the one-election only third party, the States Rights Party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats.

Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party had fully dominated South Carolina. Spence was the first Republican in either house of the legislature since 1902. In 1966, Spence was elected to the South Carolina Senate and became the minority leader of a six-member caucus. He was reelected in 1968.

In 1970, Spence ran for the 2nd congressional district seat again. Watson, who had defeated Spence eight years before, had become a Republican in 1965, a year after Thurmond's own defection, and was instead running for governor. This time, Watson was defeated by the Democratic lieutenant governor, John C. West, but Spence won a narrow victory for the House seat that Watson vacated. Spence became the first freshman Republican congressman from South Carolina since 1896 and only the second since Reconstruction to win—Watson was the first—an undisputed victory in a House election in the state. Spence was unopposed for reelection in the Nixon-Agnew landslide of 1972 and reelected fourteen times thereafter.

In 1974, Spence defeated Matthew J. Perry, who later became South Carolina's first African American judge of the United States District Court in Columbia, in what was otherwise a weak year for Republicans nationally tough James B. Edwards succeeded where Albert Watson had failed in becoming the first Republican governor of South Carolina since Reconstruction. Spence faced no credible opposition again until 1980, when Democratic state Senator Tom Turnipseed, an Alabama native and a lawyer from Columbia, ran against him. One of Spence's consultants, Lee Atwater, ran several push polls—a new tactic at the time—informing voters that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP and had undergone mental-health treatments as a teenager, telling reporters that Turnipseed had been hooked up to "jumper cables". In a letter to Turnipseed after his own diagnosis of fatal brain cancer, Atwater called the jumper-cable remark "one of the low points" of his career. This episode is covered in the award-winning documentary film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Aided by Ronald W. Reagan at the head of the Republican ticket, Spence was reelected with 55 percent of the vote. After cruising to reelection in 1982 and 1984, Spence won by only 7 percent in 1986, in which year Carroll Campbell became the second Republican to win the South Carolina governorship since Reconstruction. Spence faced another tough campaign in 1988, but no other Democrat challenged him until 1998.