Election Eve 2022: Notes

A mail piece from "Let's Do This Oklahoma" [sic] addressed to the college-aged voter in the house, depicts Brad Banks, the Republican nominee for the open House 70 seat, Gov. Kevin Stitt, and State Superintendent candidate Ryan Walters as penguins. Banks is being attacked because Americans for Prosperity, which supports school choice and economic liberty generally, has sent independent-expenditure mailers in support of Banks. The mailer claims SB 1647 (which did not pass) would have taken as much as $17,500 per child away from public schools, but the little footnote points to an article that states that this high figure is for special-needs children who get greater state and federal support, and $5,942 to $8,116 is a more typical number. That low amount is state aid only, and the high amount includes some federal per-student aid for special needs; both are already tied to average daily attendance (ADA); that would follow the student, as it already does as students move from one district to another or between traditional and charter public schools.

If a child transfers from one public school district to another, the donor district has its ADA drop by one and the recipient district has its ADA increase by one, and the state aid formula changes accordingly, while local support, based on property tax millage and property-tax funded bond issues, remains unchanged. Federal money tied to a child's economic situation or learning difficulties would also move with the child. So when Democrat Tulsa City Councilor Lori Decter Wright transferred her children from Union Public Schools to Tulsa Public Schools because TPS had mask mandates, the ADA of both districts changed -- Union's state aid dropped, TPS's state aid increased, and taxpayer money was stolen from Union to benefit TPS, according to the anti-school-choice way of thinking.

Yet another dark-money mailer, this time for OK Progress LLC, attacks Brad Banks and backs Kaiser Kabal Kandidate Suzanne Schreiber, again over school choice. Attacking school choice seems like a bad strategy for a House District located within the boundaries of the failing Tulsa Public School district, unless you assume that the voters are either long-ago TPS alumni who don't realize how much things have changed in TPS since the 1950s or childless gentrifiers who support public schools for ideological reasons but will never have to deal with TPS themselves.

UPDATE: Neither OK Progress LLC nor Let's Do This Oklahoma have filed any paperwork with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission. There ought to be a law against any electioneering communication until and unless a voter can take the "Paid for by" line and look up the names of organizers and donors on the Ethics Committee website. And -- listen, legislators! -- PACs and issue committees ought to be on the same reporting schedule as candidate committees, not on a quarterly schedule.

The best way to discourage a flood of dark-money attack mailers in the next election is to ensure they don't work this election. Vote for Kevin Stitt for Governor, Ryan Walters for State Superintendent of Schools, Brad Banks in House 70, and other good men and women who have been attacked by wealthy cowards.

A conservative friend questioned my recommendation to vote for Libertarian nominees in the Attorney General and Labor Commissioner races. Libertarian AG nominee Lynda Steele spoke at a pro-abortion rally. Labor Commissioner nominee Will Daugherty is a cage-stage Libertarian who thinks illegal immigrants should be allowed to work legally in Oklahoma and considers the Song of Solomon pornographic; on the positive side, he wants to reduce occupational license fees and other regulations that serve as barriers to entry for entrepreneurs.

There's little danger that the Republican nominees will lose to the Libertarians. Liberal RINOs Gent Drummond (who continued to fund Democrat candidates for federal office in the 2000s and 2010s when control of House and Senate were in the balance) and Leslie Osborn (who really seems to hate social conservatives) will be buoyed along by the same wealthy donors that bamboozled primary voters into believing that they were the true conservatives in the race. But suppose one or both of those Libertarian candidates won. If either Libertarian tried to push an anti-conservative policy, they'd be taken apart by the legislature and hounded from office, and Gov. Stitt would appoint a conservative replacement. If Drummond and Osborn pursued the same anti-conservative policies, they'd be defended by the RINOs in the legislature and the GOP establishment because they have an R after their names. Either way, voting Libertarian is a safe protest vote in those two elections.

Every living person who has served as Tulsa District 1 City Councilor was running for office this year. Incumbent Vanessa Hall-Harper won re-election with a majority in the August city general election. Jack Henderson, the incumbent Hall-Harper defeated in 2016, is the Democrat nominee for Labor Commissioner. Henderson's District 1 predecessor, Joe Williams, is the Democrat nominee for Osage County Commissioner for District 3, an open seat. The Rev. B. S. Roberts, the first councilor representing District 1, who served from 1990 to 1994, died in 1997.