2024 Oklahoma congressional races: Vote Republican

Oklahoma has no U. S. Senate races this year -- Markwayne Mullin will face the voters in 2026, James Lankford in 2028 -- but four of our five House seats have general election contests. District 3 Congressman Frank Lucas drew only Republican opponents and won re-election in the June primary.

For me as a conservative voter, the best possible outcome of the November congressional elections is a Republican majority with members of the House Freedom Caucus holding the balance of power and able to hold House leadership accountable to conservative principles. With the House so narrowly divided, Republicans can't afford to lose any of what ought to be safe seats, like the five in Oklahoma. So I urge my readers to vote to re-elect Kevin Hern, Josh Brecheen (a Freedom Caucus member), Tom Cole, and Stephanie Bice.

Quite apart from the calculus of party control, Kevin Hern and Josh Brecheen deserve another term for effectively upholding Oklahoma values in the House.

2nd District Congressman Josh Brecheen is finishing his first term. Conservative groups give him the highest rating of any Federal legislator in the state, with 100% from CPAC Foundation and 98% from Heritage Action for America. As a newly sworn-in House member, Brecheen was part of a small group who used their leverage over Kevin McCarthy's re-election as speaker to force McCarthy to agree to rules changes in favor of transparency and the empowerment of individual members. Brecheen was a field representative for Sen. Tom Coburn prior to his own election to the Oklahoma State Senate and has demonstrated a Coburn-like courage to resist peer pressure and stand for fiscal sanity.

Kevin Hern has been an effective conservative legislator who has gained the respect of his peers. He has ratings of 96% from CPAC Foundation and 91% from Heritage Action. He is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the conservative congressional policy group within the House Republican caucus, and he was nominated for Speaker twice in 2023. Beyond his official duties, Hern and his family have been generous donors to Tulsa Classical Academy, Oklahoma's first classical charter school. (Disclosure: I serve on the board of Tulsa Classical Academy.) Hern has been a stalwart supporter of freedom of speech and religious liberty, effective border security, and 2nd Amendment rights.

Hern has two general election opponents, Democrat Dennis Baker and independent Mark Sanders. Baker is a former FBI agent who proudly announces his support for two of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history: Roe v. Wade and McGirt v. Oklahoma. Sanders is an attorney originally from Tulsa who returned to practice here with Gable Gotwals after many years in Connecticut.

I have known Mark Sanders since high school. He was a couple of years ahead of me at Holland Hall, and he and I were part of a morning prayer group that met before the school day began. Since his return to Tulsa, we've had a number of good conversations on urban issues and local history. When he told me he was running for Congress, I thought it was a shame that he wasn't running for mayor instead. (This was before Brent Van Norman entered the race.)

I was surprised that Sanders opted to run for Congress as an independent. Legislative bodies larger than, say, three members will form factions, and with more than a few dozen members, there will be party caucuses, with the majority party in control of the flow of legislation and the organization and leadership of committees. Forty years ago, a blue-collar, pro-life Boston voter might choose Republican Ronald Reagan for President and Democrat Tip O'Neill for Congress, because, as O'Neill said, "All politics is local." A mere ten years later, Republicans under Newt Gingrich successfully nationalized the mid-term elections with the Contract with America, producing the first Republican House majority since the Eisenhower Administration. This year more than ever, I believe voters are going to vote not merely for the person who will represent them in the U. S. House but for the party who will control the House. It's not a good year to be an independent candidate.

Although there are four independents in the Senate -- Krysten Sinema of Arizona, Angus King of Maine, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia -- all four caucus with the Democrats, all four are up for re-election this year, and two, Sinema and Manchin, are not seeking re-election. Individual Senators have prerogatives that are not dependent on party caucus standing, but this is not the case in the House. The House currently has no independents. The only true case of a House member elected as an independent in my lifetime is Bernie Sanders.

Much of Mark Sanders's platform would not be out of place in the Democrat Party. He supports a cap-and-trade carbon tax to combat global warming, abolition of partisan congressional elections, an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, six weeks paid family leave per year, single-payer health care, and a "steeply graduated" wealth tax to replace the income tax. He wants a constitutional amendment to overturn the Valeo and Citizens United decisions, permitting greater restrictions on visible flows of money in politics.

Sanders takes some more conservative and Trump-aligned positions as well. He would ban social media accounts for children under 18 and require strict 18+ age verification for access to pornographic websites. He wants a negotiated end to the Ukraine conflict. He supports tariffs to "repatriate our industrial base." He supports term limits of 6 years -- three terms in the House and one term in the Senate.

Sanders rightly acknowledges the mess created by McGirt, but his solution is to convene a summit. (The straightforward solution is to have Congress disestablish, in a idiot-Gorsuch-proof way, the reservations that Congress had disestablished 117 years ago, as everyone at the time -- federal, state, and tribal officials alike -- understood. But that would require a degree of courage, given the amount of casino money tribal governments have to offer politicians and their potential opponents.)

As of the end of September, Sanders had raised $48,198.51 and spent $30,776.51. By comparison, Hern had over a million dollars cash on hand, and Baker had raised $261,393.97 and spent $149,527.88. Sanders's major donors include Robin Flint Ballenger, City-Council-suer Burt Holmes, and Frederic Dorwart, the attorney to the Kaiser System. Sanders's wife, Sarah Poston, is an attorney with Dorwart's firm, and several other Dorwart attorneys are donors as well.