Elizabeth Johnston, known as "Liz", was born into a Democratic political family. Her father, Olin D. Johnston, was Governor of South Carolina from 1935 to 1939 and again from 1943 to 1945. He then served in the United States Senate from 1945 until his death in 1965.
She returned to live in Spartanburg County, where she was elected to the County Council, serving from 1975 to 1976.[2] In 1978 she was elected to the South Carolina State Senate, serving from 1979 to 1986.[3] She was the second woman in the South Carolina Senate, after Mary Gordon Ellis.[4]
Bill Workman's father, W. D. Workman Jr., a journalist and author, had been her father's Republican opponent in the 1962 general election, when Johnston won his last term in the U.S. Senate.[6]
Patterson was narrowly reelected in 1988, when she defeated Republican attorney and city councilman Knox H. White. George H. W. Bush carried the 4th district by the largest margin in the state. She won a third term with a greater margin in 1990 over Terry Haskins, a state Representative from Greenville. That year Campbell, as the Republican incumbent, won reelection as governor in a landslide.
Although Patterson represented a district that had been trending Republican for some time, she was thought to be a fairly secure incumbent, given her family ties and her victory in three successive elections under difficult conditions. However, she was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1992 by Republican Bob Inglis, an attorney who had never run for office before. As in 1988, George H. W. Bush carried the 4th with his largest margin in the state. After Patterson left office in 1993, no woman would serve in Congress from South Carolina until 2021, when Nancy Mace took office following her defeat of Joe Cunningham in 2020, and Democrats have only tallied more than 40 percent in the 4th district once since 1992.
^ abHartsook, Herb., Interview with Liz Patterson, transcript of an oral history conducted 1995 by Herb Hartsook, South Carolina Political Collections Oral History Project, South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina, 1995, p. 3, 27. (https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/scpcot/id/44)