James D. Johnson - Campaigns of 1966 and 1968

Campaigns of 1966 and 1968

In 1966, Johnson entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary and led the six-candidate field with 105,607 votes (25.1 percent). He went into a runoff election with fellow former Justice J. Frank Holt (born ca. 1910), who polled 92,711 votes (22.1 percent). Liberal former U.S. Representative Brooks Hays of Little Rock finished third with 64,814 (15.4 percent). Another former U.S. representative, Dale Alford, who had unseated Hays as a write-in candidate in 1958, ran fourth with 53,531 votes (12.7 percent). Prosecuting attorney Sam Boyce of Newport ran fifth with 49,744 (11.8 percent), and Raymond Rebasen finished last with 35,607 votes (8.5 percent). In the runoff primary, Johnson prevailed with 210,543 ballots (51.9 percent) to Holt's 195,442 votes (48.1 percent). However, Johnson then lost the general election, 257,203 votes (45.6 percent) to the moderate Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who polled 306,324 ballots (54.4 percent). Rockefeller was a younger brother of New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, later a Vice President of the United States. Jim Johnson won majorities in forty counties to Rockefeller's thirty-five counties. Every major population center supported Rockefeller, who prevailed in the northwestern counties, in Little Rock, and in many eastern counties with large African American populations. Black voters provided Rockefeller's margin of victory.

Johnson then ran against incumbent J. William Fulbright in the 1968 Democratic primary for the Senate but was again defeated, 132,038 (31.7 percent) to 220,684 (52.5 percent); a third candidate, Bobby K. Hays, received the remaining 12.7 percent. Fulbright then defeated the Republican nominee, Charles T. Bernard, a farmer and businessman from Earle in Crittenden County in eastern Arkansas, who is believed to have drawn considerable support from Johnson's former primary voters.

Johnson's then 40-year-old wife, Virginia, meanwhile, ran for the governorship in the same primary election, making her the first woman in Arkansas to run for governor. She lost the nomination by a wide margin in a runoff with State Representative Marion H. Crank (1915–1994) of Foreman in Little River County, who was in turn narrowly defeated by Rockefeller in the general election. Another candidate in the primary was former Arkansas Attorney General Bruce Bennett of El Dorado, who was first elected in 1956, the year that Johnson challenged Faubus. Bennett himself unsuccessfully opposed Faubus in the 1960 gubernatorial primary.