Oklahoma Primary 2024: Final thoughts

Some final thoughts in the wee small hours of election day. Don't forget to have a look at my main election day post with my list of endorsements and links to information from other reliable sources.

Fifty years ago, filing for office happened in early July, with the primary at the end of August and the runoff three weeks later. When the candidate filings for 1974 were printed in the Tulsa Tribune, I cut the list out and pinned it to my bulletin board.

Of 520 candidates statewide who filed for county office this year, 470 are Republican, 43 are Democrat, and 7 are independent. In the 9-county Tulsa-Bartlesville-Muskogee Combined Statistical Area, 62 of the 68 candidates for county office are Republicans. Three Democrats and one independent are running for Tulsa County Commission District 2, and there's one Democrat running for that seat in Pawnee County. I recall that the proportion on my 1974 list was the exact opposite. In July 1974, registered voters numbered 991,928 Democrats, 326,167 Republicans, 19,603 independents, and 3,511 with the American Party.

In 1974, the important electoral battles happened in the Democratic primaries. Today, the real battle for control of the state legislature happens in GOP primaries across the state.

While Oklahoma Republican legislators are generally reliably conservative on social issues, the majority departs from professed Republican platform principles anytime a lobbyist with access to campaign cash strolls past their offices. They may take strong stands on social issues with immediate impact, but they let themselves be rolled by lobbyists fighting the strategic measures that will ensure a conservative future in Oklahoma.

That's why a left-leaning private organization still has legal standing as a gatekeeper to the legal profession and judicial offices in Oklahoma. It's why we can't move public school board elections to a time of year when more voters are apt to be paying attention. It's why the legislative leadership keeps trying to undermine the first effective conservative serving as State Superintendent. These people are happy to use taxpayer dollars to lure businesses without regard to whether the people they bring may turn the state "blue" over time.

Chad McCarthy, who is challenging Judd Strom in House District 10, put together an 8-page newspaper detailing the incumbent's votes for cronyism, higher fees, more spending, more regulation, less transparency, more centralized control by legislative leaders. McCarthy provides bill numbers and a paragraph on each explaining why Strom's vote violates conservative principles. I suspect there's a strong correlation with the key votes tracked by the Oklahoma Constitution newspaper and OCPA Legislative Scorecard, and you'll probably find many of the incumbents who are backed by massive campaign warchests. McCarthy calls these people the Speaker's Lemmings and notes "their love of the Capitol nightlife."

They often wine and dine with lobbyists and other politicians at night, funded on the lobbyists' dime.

This allows the lobbyists to exert sway over the legislator, and it leaves the legislator much less time for actually reading the bills and knowing what they are voting on the next day....

State records show that Strom has attended more than 175 lobbyist-funded events, a sure indicator that he's likely a card-carrying lemming.

This lazy lawmaking results in the enactment of many bad laws, and that's why, as the reader reviews the audit on the following pages of this publication, they will see so many shocking votes that are complete betrayals of our Republican values.

In 2022, Tim Brooks, my pick of four good candidates in the Senate 33 primary this year, created a bullet-point summary of House District 76 incumbent Ross Ford's six years of bad votes at the State Capitol.

The incumbents who are part of the Favor Factory at the State Capitol (and the open-seat candidates seeking to join them) have plenty of PAC money to spend on big color postcards, billboards, robocalls and robotexts, and, more recently, radio and TV ads, telling you how wonderfully conservative they are. There was a time when there were trusted voices on local radio who could dissect these ads and evaluate their claims against the actual record. Those voices are all gone now. (As happy as I am to hear Michael DelGiorno's voice in the mornings on 1300, he doesn't fulfill the need for a local talk radio host; he isn't going to be giving air time to this year's Tulsa City Council elections.)

I have a few handy heuristics for evaluating the veracity of candidates and campaign materials. I'm willing to entertain proof of exceptions, but if any of the following are true, I assume the campaign flyer is shading the truth to mislead or deceive me:

• Has the acronym "CAMP" on the bulk mail permit.
• Was paid for by a dark-money group that has no online information about its founders, leaders, or funders.

And likewise, I make a rebuttable presumption that a candidate is not going to be looking out for our interests and may already be corrupt, or on a slippery slope to that condition, if his campaign finance reports show:

• Large sums of money paid to Campaign Advocacy Management Professionals (CAMP)
• Large contributions from large numbers of special-interest PACs
• Large contributions from tribal governments

As I said, there may be and have been exceptions, but the purpose of a heuristic is to give you a good starting point for further evaluation.

MORE: I've added a last-minute update to my Corporation Commission post, remembering Brian Bingman's betrayal of conservatives on the State Senate's 2014 passage for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.