Super Surreal Observations From Election Night

What Little Dixie, the smelter belt, and a defeated political establishment tell us about the Oklahoma electorate.

In the upcoming days, as the leftist forces that propelled Drummond’s campaign return to their true roots by supporting the inner-city liberal Cyndi Munson—a candidate whose woke, left-wing views are unprecedented in the history of Democratic nominees—there will be a tendency for those who understand the importance of electing Mazzei to try to justify the Mazzei flip-flop.

They should not.

Justifying the unjustifiable will rot the soul of the grassroots movement, just as the special-interest money has long ago compromised the majority of Republican officeholders.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

The Republican Party was celebrating a very rare accomplishment: bucking the in-power, off-year election-cycle trend and picking up seats in Congress—inspiring Glenn Beck to declare that George W. Bush would be a Republican FDR, a transformative president whom generations of Americans would look back upon with absolute admiration.

But for Oklahoma Republicans, that excitement was greatly tamped down, as they faced a disaster the implications of which are still being felt to this day: Democrats held the state House. They held the state Senate. And an openly pro-choice governor would be coming into power: Brad Henry.

Little Dixie had struck again, perhaps because of an anomaly—the cockfighting vote—but nevertheless, it was a devastating election night. Henry, so very out of touch with Oklahoma values, would become a transitional figure, pushing Oklahoma’s entire judiciary dramatically leftward and spearheading so many policies that placed the state into the seemingly everlasting purgatory of mediocrity in which it now finds itself.

I was reminded of this as I reviewed the precinct map of this weeks election results.

Times have changed.

This time, it was Little Dixie’s precincts that carried the day for the people.

Many of the children of the old-guard Democrats who put the pro-choice, big-government Henry in the Governor’s Mansion—helped along by cockfighting and a Toby Keith jingle—are today’s Republicans.

And they just saved the day.

It’s so very surreal to zoom in on Mike Mazzei’s win in McAlester, the very heart of Gene Stipe’s evil empire, and come to terms with how that town—and the many like it all across southern Oklahoma—just saved the state from once again being ruled by someone with values that are so very out of touch with Oklahoma voters.

They voted against a campaign backed by perhaps the most sophisticated political operation in state history—a mélange of dark-money groups funded by unimaginable millions—albeit handicapped by one of the most unlikeable statewide candidates Oklahoma has ever seen. He had spent four long years eviscerating the normal, accepted standards of officeholder propriety and politicizing his statewide office on a scope and scale unimaginable to those who understand how a public servant should conduct himself while operating on the taxpayers’ tab.

Drummond’s campaign ads began just days after the conclusion of the 2024 election cycle, ensuring that Oklahomans were forced to suffer through a perpetual political-ad cycle, with very little relief dating perhaps all the way back to 2023.

Now, as one looks at the precinct map, it’s clear:

Little Dixie saved the state.

It’s such a different world. And for those of us who remember how it used to be, it’s still hard to fully appreciate.

Here’s what is also very notable about this: McGirt has backfired on those politicians who went all in on siding with the tribes.

For you see, it was Little Dixie that put Drummond into the attorney general’s office in 2022.

It’s Little Dixie that just sent Drummond home.

I suspect that, whether tribal members or not, just about everyone in Little Dixie is starting to realize the insanity of McGirt. And though, in 2022, tribal-member Republicans may have been motivated by Drummond’s pro-tribal stance, it has since backfired.

Thus, once again, as one looks at the precinct returns with a bird’s-eye view, just as in the primaries, one once again sees that old Sequoyah-versus-Oklahoma line reconstituted.

Fascinating.

Two other observations of note.

While much of the farm and ranch country went for Drummond, keeping the election close, some of those western cities didn’t.

One can look at Garfield County as an example of this. Rural Garfield County went for Drummond. Enid went for Mazzei. Similarly, Lawton went for Mazzei as well—a real warning sign to the local—and perhaps the most leftist—Republican in the Legislature, Daniel Pae, who endorsed Drummond.

There was an exception to Drummond’s western Oklahoma rural-country strength: Major County.

Here, there is a pocket of Mazzei support in a sea of Drummond.

There’s something about the rural denizens of that county that, I believe, allows them to put principle above perceived self-interest.

And as a fun fact, when Kevin Stitt beat Mick Cornett in 2018, the precinct providing the largest margin of victory was a Major County precinct.

And notably, in the 2014 primary, Mary Fallin’s worst precinct?

Yup.

It was in Major County.

Now, for why this was even a close election in the first place: in northeastern Oklahoma, where ranchland meets the tribal regions, Drummond didn’t lose support like he did in Little Dixie.

He should have, but he didn’t. In fact, he flexed.

And that is undoubtedly the impact of the proposed government-subsidized aluminum smelter that Drummond made into his foremost attack on Mazzei.

In Rogers County precincts where Mazzei should have won, instead, Drummond took 80 percent of the vote. That effect spread into Wagoner and Mayes counties, and had Drummond pulled it off and won on election night, it would have undoubtedly been on the strength of this issue.

In fact, with perhaps tongue firmly planted in cheek, one could certainly be forgiven for suspecting that Mazzei’s investment in his own campaign was simply a hedge against a large pro-Drummond investment in the Kalshi market, considering the way Mazzei handled the whole smelter affair. He continued poking at what was perhaps the most dramatic major policy reversal in Oklahoma politics: one night firmly allied with the concepts of the free market, and the next all in on the massive, government-subsidized monstrosity that had been approved by the state House just three days after its introduction, before almost any of those impacted likely even knew the proposal existed, and being fast tracked through the permitting process in a way that should offend land owners everywhere.

Now, though the observant voter was rightly just as offended by Drummond’s sudden and nakedly political discovery of the importance of this issue as it was by Mazzei’s flip-flop, one must realize that people value integrity. And once that perception of integrity lost sets in, it isn’t coming back during the campaign cycle.

One simply can’t horse-trade so openly and then expect to persuade people to have faith in one’s integrity—or to believe that one is telling them the truth. If Mazzei wants that enthusiasm factor to come back in 2030, he’s going to have to earn it, and that will be a heavy lift.

And the fall out from this wasn’t just limited to those east-of-Tulsa counties. For those who were not directly impacted, there was likely a massive enthusiasm damper. Sure, the majority of Republican voters, unlike those in the smelter’s fallout zone, weren’t motivated by fear for their livelihoods. They were motivated instead by the death by a thousand cuts caused by the special-law corporate-welfare giveaways that are sinking the republic beneath a horde of corruption. But that isn’t motivating them by means of immediate survival instinct. They can probably survive yet one more cut to keep the Darth Vader–like Drummond at bay.

But seeing Mazzei flip-flop after a brutal second term of being betrayed by their previous “grassroots” choice, Kevin Stitt, simply told them: It’s going to be the same old thing again.

In the upcoming days, as the leftist forces that propelled Drummond’s campaign return to their true roots by supporting the inner-city liberal Cyndi Munson—a candidate whose woke, left-wing views are unprecedented in the history of Democratic nominees—there will be a tendency for those who understand the importance of electing Mazzei to try to justify the Mazzei flip-flop.

They should not.

Justifying the unjustifiable will rot the soul of the grassroots movement, just as the special-interest money has long ago compromised the majority of Republican officeholders.

The Mazzei campaign must remember, first and foremost, that the art of politics is not about getting 99 percent of the vote. It is rather about securing 51 percent. They must learn from their mistake, understand that they have lost part of their support base, and move on.

Continuing to poke at the problem—to justify what cannot be justified, including a betrayal of free-market principles as well as transparent and open process, and an embrace of corporate welfare on steroids, along with the unconstitutional special-law-making expressly prohibited by the state constitution—will repeat the mistakes of the Stitt administration and make it much harder to govern with any enthusiasm going forward.

The Munson record speaks for itself—stay tuned to next week’s update—and it will prove incredibly unpalatable to the vast majority of Oklahomans. My best and most heartfelt advice to the Mazzei campaign and its supporters is simple: point out and expose the liberalism of the opposition, then explain Mazzei’s desire to return to the small-government principles that have long been abandoned in Oklahoma government, and everything else will take care of itself.

Keep it simple.

The Great Rising Power: Grassroots Social Media

With just a little financial support, James Taylor would have beaten Robert Franklin to become the state’s next superintendent of public education.

It was a forgivable error: assuming James Taylor didn’t have any chance of beating Robert Franklin, who was clearly being driven into office by the education-establishment machine—a machine whose government financial and vendor-driven special interests ensure that its reach far outscales the state’s nascent grassroots community.

But as Franklin arrogantly doubled down on DEI, leaving it to special-interest money to run the “Robert Franklin is a MAGA Republican” ads, even a modicum of financial support could have exposed Franklin’s true beliefs, and he would have lost.

When the campaign-finance reports come in, we are likely to find that James Taylor was outspent by an eye-popping factor, both in direct campaign spending and in the amount of dark money deployed during the final days of the campaign.

The bigger question for those center-right dark-money forces that could have exposed Franklin—in essence, the school-choice money—might be: Why even bother?

With Mazzei potentially winning the Governor’s Mansion, the question now becomes: Will he appoint the board members who will put the DEI-loving Robert Franklin in check, much as Stitt’s board did to the great opponent of all things DEI, Ryan Walters?

At the end of the day, the effort to force Walters out was the work of Drummond, who, as attorney general, made it extremely difficult for Walters to pursue his agency agenda with effective legal counsel, and Stitt’s board members, whose coup de grâce was to ensure Walters could not appoint an agency attorney of his choice.

Once your own lawyers aren’t on your side, there’s very little room to move, and Walters knew the wisdom of leaving the building.

A Mazzei-appointed board could easily put Franklin into the same box.

It could pass its own standards and, with the support of the agency’s board-hired lawyers, set the agenda at State Board of Education meetings.

So, the school-choice money ensured that Drummond would never fulfill his dream of occupying the Governor’s Mansion, while perhaps understanding that, with Mazzei, it would get a two-for-one result, courtesy of Drummond, Stitt, and all the others who did so much to stop the will of the people from being heard when they asked Ryan Walters to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic that is the state’s public education system—a broken system that, as should be clear to any open-eyed observer, Franklin has no clue how to fix. This was most notably demonstrated in his post-win News 9 interview, where he offered no concrete specifics and instead repeated the great “listicle” fallacy that “Oklahoma is 50th in education.” Apparently, no one has told Franklin that the WalletHub clickbait listicle, which spawned that particular talking point back in the days when the corporate media were frenzied against Walters, now has Oklahoma at 49th. But a sound bite is a sound bite, so updating it for accuracy isn’t in the cards, even for the presumed-to-be superintendent of public education.

And for all those who are confused about why Oklahoma Republicans could elect both Mazzei and Franklin, the answer is simple: James Taylor simply wasn’t given the means, methods, or special-interest dark-money air cover necessary to inform the people that Robert Franklin was most certainly not, in fact, a “MAGA Republican.”

But, the power of grassroots social media certainly got the word out to a large audience.

When Elon Musk bought X and the censorship machine of the radical left-wing Democrats was defeated in 2024, robust social media and an open internet were preserved. With these technologies, the inevitable day approaches when, no matter what the corporate media does to reframe or even stifle the truth, it won’t matter. People simply don’t care about those dying media entities, because they no longer need gatekeepers and because the truth can be found online, and it’s only going to get stronger.

Every content creator, old-school blogger, Substack publisher, podcaster, X community administrator, and grassroots lawmaker who turns on a camera and explains what is really going on is doing their part to replace corporate media—and this is how the people reclaim their state government.

Are There Enough Conservatives to Give Mazzei a Veto-Proof Majority?

The great Senate purge of conservatives continued on Tuesday night, with two more of the more conservative-minded incumbents going down to defeat.

This has reportedly led at least one prominent political-analysis talking head to declare that Senate President Lonnie Paxton is now a kingmaker.

He is not.

With Mazzei’s win, in clear opposition to the elements that hold power in the Legislature, the coalition of conservatives in the Senate now has the ability to provide Mazzei with something Kevin Stitt never had: a veto-proof bloc capable of keeping the Legislature from simply running over the governor.

Stitt, infamously, spoke loudly and carried no stick.

Absolutely no stick.

In fact, one of his office’s key appointees, Dustin Hillary, helped lead the dark-money effort to reelect the very legislative coalition that had repeatedly run over the governor—often with open disrespect. The scope of that political self-sabotage is difficult to fathom, and it has unfortunately become a defining part of Stitt’s legacy, one he may never be able to escape.

My advice to Mazzei: embrace those conservatives, build a veto proof minority coalition and stay strong on the conservative principles of Oklahomans and you will be able to do what Stitt couldn’t do: govern.

The Biggest Winner on Election Night

Mazzei wasn’t the only source of good news for the people of Oklahoma. Kevin West’s defeat of the establishment’s John Pfeiffer provided a great example: one can spend years touting the establishment line, as Pfeiffer did, slavishly dedicated to the whims of those who held power, and it won’t matter.

Just as Charles McCall, who for eight long years was perhaps the most powerful politician in Oklahoma, went down to defeat, so did one of his foremost lieutenants, Pfeiffer. Likewise, one of the McCall coalition’s foremost curb-stompers, Dale Kerbs, faced overwhelming defeat in a local-level race.

All in all, those arrogant legislators who for a decade, have eviscerated normal order in the House of Representatives, destroying the deliberative culture of that institution and ensuring that its nature as the people’s house is threatened, are stuck in the mud when it’s time to move on. And with Drummond’s defeat, their Plan B—cushy executive-branch appointments—just got eviscerated as well.

Likewise, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert’s initiative, State Question 844, went down to an epic defeat.

The state’s legislators, including those with future aspirations, should take note: It was Kevin West who, after getting off the McCall train—undoubtedly a pretty painful experience for him at the time—led all candidates on Election Day and was the only candidate to pull in more than 200,000 votes.

It’s a great example that governing based on principle, even when in a minority, though it may seem counterintuitive at the time, is the best strategy for long-term advancement, ironically enough.

In a political world that purged most conservatives, leaving behind a very thin farm team, Kevin West somehow found a way to survive. And the transition of Labor from one of the state’s most liberal politicians to one of its most conservative is one of this cycle’s most powerful white pills.

Stay tuned for next week’s breakdown of the upcoming general election race between Mazzei and Munson. You won’t want to miss it.