Columbia. Watson won his party nomination with 52 percent of the vote over Frank C. Owens, the former mayor of Columbia and the choice of party regulars. Watson defeated Spence with 53 percent of the general election vote, the closest congressional race in South Carolina in memory. The 2nd had a conservative bent; the area's old-line Democrats had begun splitting their tickets in national elections as early as the 1940s. Watson's win was helped by 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. In 1966, Spence was elected to the South Carolina Senate; he became the minority leader of a six-member caucus. He was reelected to the senate in 1968. In 1970, Spence ran for the 2nd congressional district seat again. Watson had become a Republican in 1965, a year after Thurmond's own switch; he was giving up his congressional seat ran in 1970 for governor. He was defeated by the Democratic lieutenant governor, John C. West. Spence won a narrow victory, becoming the first freshman Republican congressman elected from South Carolina since 1896; he was the second Republican to be elected from the state since Reconstruction (Watson was the first, elected as an incumbent after his switch to the Republican Party). Both he and Watson represented conservative whites, rather than the majority African-American Republicans in South Carolina who had supported the party of Abraham Lincoln. Spence was unopposed for reelection in the Nixon-Agnew landslide of 1972 and reelected fourteen times thereafter. `In 1974, Spence defeated challenger Matthew J. Perry, an African-American Democrat who had made his reputation in civil rights cases. Aided by Ronald W. Reagan at the head of the Republican ticket, Spence was reelected in 1980 with 55 percent of the vote. After cruising to reelection in 1982 and 1984, Spence found his margin reduced to seven percent in 1986. That year Carroll Campbell became the second Republican to win the South Carolina governorship since Reconstruction. Spence faced another tough campaign in 1988, but did not face major-party opposition again until 1998. Congressional career For his first eleven terms, Spence represented a relatively compact district in the central portion of the state. Redistricting after the 1990 census resulted in shifting most of Spence's African-American constituents to the 6th District, which