It’s unusual in this day of strong partisan loyalties for a member of Congress to refuse to support his party’s presidential nominee. But it’s happening this year: The fivethirtyeight.com contributor David Wasserman provides a guide to which Republican members have supported Donald Trump or have, so far at least, refused to do so, and with what level of enthusiasm. It’s well timed since one of the “hesitant holdouts,” Ted Cruz, previously known as Lyin’ Ted, will be speaking in prime time at the convention Wednesday night.
Not endorsing your party’s nominee was not always so unheard of. It used to be relatively common back in those good old days, yearned for by many high-minded political observers, when there were lots of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, years like 1964. When the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, many liberal Republicans declined to endorse him or made very clear their disagreements with and distaste for the nominee. At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller announced the vote of the New York delegation, he said there were five abstentions. As I recall from an old Murray Kempton column I can’t find on the Internet, when a reporter asked Rockefeller who cast the five abstain votes, he said, “Anyone who wants one.”
That year two Democratic congressman, John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Albert Watson of South Carolina, explicitly endorsed and worked for Barry Goldwater, who carried their districts at a time when very few blacks there were allowed to vote. In 1965, liberals persuaded the Democratic Caucus to deprive them of their seniority. That seriously hurt Williams, then the youngest person ever elected to Congress from Mississippi and already at 46 the No. 2 ranking Democrat on the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. He must have expected to be a powerful committee chairman for years; he was re-elected in 1966 but in 1967 ran successfully for governor of Mississippi. Watson was only a sophomore and didn’t lose valuable seniority. He resigned in February 1965 and ran successfully as a Republican in the June 1965 special election. That wasn’t without local precedent: Sen. Strom Thurmond had switched to the Republican party during the 1964 campaign and was re-elected that year as a Republican.
Watson was re-elected in 1966 and 1968, but Republicans remained in a seemingly hopeless minority, and he ran for governor — and lost — in 1970. It was a different course taken by a rural-based Democrat from the next-door state of Georgia who had supported segregation in the past, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.
