By Steve Byas

First of all, we have become rather lackadaisical about our political status in this “deep red state.” These problems are not beyond repair, but they do need to be addressed.

The governor’s race and the state school superintendent’s race are good places to start this post-mortem. Mike Mazzei defeated Attorney General Gentner Drummond in a nail-biter, but it should not have been close. A better candidate would have defeated Drummond easily. The runoff was Mazzei’s to lose, and he almost did. The hope is that he will be a better governor – if he can defeat a strongly left-wing Democrat nominee in Cyndi Munson – than he is as a candidate. I suspect he will be.

Had President Donald Trump not butted into the primary and endorsed Mazzei, it is probable that Chip Keating would have been the nominee of the Republican Party. Keating would have not had the negatives of Mazzei, and would have likely been an easy victor over Drummond. It is not that Trump’s endorsement made a huge difference, just that it made the difference between Mazzei being the nominee and Keating being the nominee.

Drummond has been running for governor since he took office as attorney general. If there was a camera, he was quick to get in front of it. He found ways to keep his name in the news, posing as some sort of champion for the public. He was the beneficiary of a situation in which so-called moderates are now in the Republican Party, and not the Democratic Party. They want to remake the Oklahoma Republican Party as a non-conservative party.

The governor’s race illustrates quite well why so many wanted to end the closed primary and replace it with the jungle primary, in which party registration would no longer matter. In the jungle primary form of an open primary, all candidates run in one primary, regardless of political party, with the top two vote-getters (unless one received a majority of the vote) advances to the general election. Had this sort of primary been in effect in this election, Mazzei would have been eliminated and your choice in the General Election would have been Drummond and Munson.

This leads us to the next problem. Oklahoma is now filled with political consultants. Some are principled patriots who want to see good solid conservatives win elections, but many are, to be blunt, just in it for the money. They couldn’t care less who wins the elections in the end, so long as their bank account gets fatter. The political consulting class, as a group, strongly favored the jungle primary.

They argued that they want “more competition,” which, of course, means more clients out there to increase their wealth. You see, the general elections in Oklahoma over the past couple of decades have become non-competitive, with Republicans winning all of the statewide races, and most of the legislative races. A jungle primary increases the chances of “competition,” which translates to more clients and more money.

The race for state school superintendent is an even bigger red flag for conservatives. For all the criticism of James Taylor – that he had no school administrative background – the fault lies with those who did not recruit a conservative who had those “credentials.” There are lots of retired school superintendents who are conservative Republicans. The remarkable thing about Taylor’s final results was not that he lost, but that he came so close to overcoming a mountain of obstacles. He is to be commended for that.

His first problem was that he had so little money. It has been said that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Money is needed to get the message out. The sad truth is that there were lots of things that Taylor’s campaign could have pointed out about his opponent – Robert Franklin – but he just did not have the financial resources to inform the electorate about those things.

Franklin handed Taylor the silver bullet that he needed by endorsing a book, The Separation of Church and Hate, the theme of which was that the world’s problems are conservatives and Bible-believing Christians. But, despite some social media posts, the general voting public simply did not know what was in the book. Even many Republicans who are very active in politics were unaware or simply did not care what was in the book. I asked one prominent Republican (who supported Franklin) what he thought about the contents of the book, and his response was that he had not read it. That makes an important statement in and of itself.

Franklin ran as the candidate with the experience and credentials to serve as state school superintendent. Even if that is true, we should not be handing over to a left-winger the position of state school superintendent. There simply is too much opportunity to slip all sorts of progressive propaganda into our public schools from that position. But seriously, there was very little in Franklin’s resume that would qualify him to be state school superintendent. After all, being the assistant superintendent of a vo-tech is hardly a learning ground for running a state agency.

Taylor was an easy target on the “qualification” question. He was in public education as a history teacher at Little Axe schools, but he had no certification in school administration. But what hurt him more than anything else was Ryan Walters. Walters poisoned the well, so to speak, for any candidate with a Christian background. Taylor is a pastor of a church, and because Walters wanted to bully the public schools to adopt such things as “the Trump Bible,” it was easy to label Taylor as “Ryan Walters 2.0.” It was not true and it was unfair, but when a low-information voter is getting ready to vote, this is the type of talking point that their cluttered mind can grasp.

What would have made a really good contest in this past election would be to see who could get in front of a camera faster – Ryan Walters or Gentner Drummond.

Then there is the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA). Not able to elect a registered Democrat, perhaps they have now decided to run Democrats in Republican primaries. Of course, it has to be a Democrat who re-registers as a Republican. Franklin fit the bill quite well. In 2023, Franklin changed his registration from Democrat to Republican. The timing is quite interesting. By 2023, Walters had emerged as Public Enemy Number One for the OEA. Perhaps, the plotting to masquerade as a Republican began at that time.

Besides the left-wing book Franklin endorsed, he actually gave a substantial political donation to the 2022 Democrat candidate for governor. In one of his Facebook posts, Franklin showed his progressive colors by insinuating that Anita Hill’s vile accusations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas were true. I have not found anything in Franklin’s past in which he supported conservative Republican candidates or conservative principles, in any way.

The OEA now had a candidate on the Republican ticket they could get behind. They did not have to get all that many of their teacher members to switch from Democrat to Republican. The truth is that many public school teachers were already registered Republican. And they probably vote Republican, most of the time. But I can tell you by experience that far too many teachers – like much of the public – pay little attention to the intricacies of politics or the news. As such, they rely on what the supposed “experts,” like the OEA to tell them what to think. The OEA and their allies pushed Franklin and pictured Taylor as just another Ryan Walters. Some teachers just believe anything the OEA tells them as the gospel truth.

For example, when Frank Keating was governor, a reporter was challenging him on his “merit pay” plan, in which some teachers would receive more money for “merit.” (Isn’t it interesting that the media rarely challenges a Democrat or a liberal Republican on anything?) The reporter asked Keating about a hypothetical situation in which only one teacher out of 25 was worthy of a merit pay increase. Keating said that was an unrealistic hypothetical, to say that 96 percent of teachers are “slugs.”

The OEA then took that and started telling their members that Keating had called teachers “slugs.” I remember how many took that as the truth, and they did not want to be confused with the facts.

If we want to keep the Drummonds and Franklins from taking over the Republican Party in Oklahoma, we are going to have to be proactive. We need to recruit candidates who will make good candidates, and we need to fund those candidates. It is going to take more than being “Keyboard Warriors,” thinking a few posts on social media is going to get the message out. Facebook posts are fine, but we cannot be naïve and think that alone is going to overcome the machinations of the Left, supported by the left-leaning Oklahoma media.

We must realize that our opposition is not just in the Democratic Party. It is in the media, in academia, and within our own Republican ranks.