Wyche Fowler - Congressional Service

Congressional Service

On April 5, 1977 he was elected in a special election to the U.S. House of Representatives to fill the vacancy caused by Andrew Young's resignation.

In 1986, as a U.S. Representative, Fowler defeated the incumbent Republican Senator Mack Mattingly. Fowler served as the junior senator from Georgia (Sam Nunn was the serving senior senator at that time). Fowler's voting record was liberal on social concerns and moderate on economic and national security issues.

He lost his re-election bid in 1992 to Georgia State Senator Paul Coverdell (who would later become leader of the state's Republican party). Fowler won a plurality of the vote against Coverdell on general election night 1992, but Georgia law requires a runoff election between the two candidates with the highest vote totals if no one candidate receives over 50 percent (a majority) of the total vote, and a Libertarian Party candidate received enough votes to keep Fowler's total below 50 percent-plus-one. In the runoff on November 11, 1992, Coverdell upset Fowler by a narrow margin.