Rockefeller’s first venture into elected politics came when he won a narrow victory over Charlie Cole Chaffin for lieutenant governor in the November 1996 special election, which was necessitated by the resignation of Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Jr., and the installation of Lieutenant Governor Mike Huckabee to the governorship.
As lieutenant governor, Rockefeller followed his father’s promotion of Arkansas’s economic interests, traveling at his own expense to seek potential foreign investors and at the same time donating his own governmental salary to charity.
In 1998, voters overwhelmingly elected him to a full four-year term, giving him sixty-seven percent of the vote against Kurt Dilday. Four years later in 2002, he was again reelected with sixty percent of the vote against Ron Sheffield.
