[4] In 1969, Representative Chrisman worked reluctantly[citation needed] with Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the first Arkansas Republican chief executive since the Reconstruction era, to pass a local-option bill to permit liquor in private clubs.
After his legislative term, Chrisman was the chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party but was required to vacate that position when he entered the 1980 gubernatorial primary against Frank White.
From 1975 to 1977, White had been a Democrat in the administration of Governor David Pryor as the executive director of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, a post which Rockefeller had filled under Orval Faubus from 1955 to 1964.
[5] Chrisman called White an "opportunist" who was attempting to take advantage of the opposition that had unexpectedly surfaced to Governor Bill Clinton's 1979 proposal to double automobile license fees.
Most Republican leaders preferred White, the president of Capital Savings and Loan Association in Little Rock, because he was better known statewide than Chrisman and had a more polished public relations style.
He said the state needed to raise taxes to improve education, drug rehabilitation, and other public services, and he promised a statewide work-release system for the prisons.
[10] A third candidate seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Connie K. Voll (born 1945) of Lonoke, is a native of Searcy, a graduate of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston,[11] and then a nutritionist and management consultant in Little Rock.,[12] Voll was the first woman in either party to have sought the governorship since Virginia Morris Johnson of Conway, the wife of former gubernatorial nominee James D. Johnson, had unsuccessfully contested the 1968 Democratic nomination for the right to run against Rockefeller.