On Nov. 3, voters will once again line up in droves at their polling places across the state and the nation to determine the shape and direction of government.
With less than a month until the midterms, it’s an open question as to whether or not Republicans will maintain their control over the Senate and House of Representatives, or if the Democratic Party can rally ahead of the current administration’s flagging approval ratings and regain control of Congress. Here in Oklahoma, four Democrats—gubernatorial candidate Cyndi Munson, Attorney General candidate Nick Coffey, Congressional District 5 candidate Jena Nelson and Senate candidate N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas—hope to unite residents of all political stripes behind their platforms, which broadly address issues like affordability, public safety and corporate accountability.
The Oklahoma Gazette spoke with each of these candidates in the last leg of the race to gain their perspectives on the most pressing issues facing Oklahomans today.
Cyndi Munson, outgoing State Representative for District 85, is perhaps the most prominent political figure of the bunch. She ran against incumbent Rep. David Dank in 2014 and lost, before defeating challenger Chip Carter in the 2015 special election following Dank’s sudden passing. Since then, Munson has been the stalwart incumbent in her district, and has risen to the position of minority leader within the Oklahoma House of Representatives; she has also served on 11 committees, including the Appropriations and Budget committee and the Government Oversight committee. Now, she’s running against Mike Mazzei to potentially become the first Democratic governor since Brad Henry.
According to Munson, the issue about which voters have talked to her the most is education. “[It] doesn’t matter if I’m out in the panhandle, down in McCurtain County, or in my home district in Oklahoma City, the issue at the top of everyone’s list is public education,” she said in an interview conducted via email. Specifically, she cites the Parental Choice Tax Credit program as a pain point for rural voters and a source of confusion for her Oklahoma City-based constituency.
“I listen to rural Oklahomans’ frustrations over their tax dollars being siphoned away to private school tuition waivers, when there isn’t even a private school option for their children,” she said. “And then I talk to some of my constituents in urban Oklahoma who acknowledge that they can already afford the private school tuition without the voucher, and would rather see investments made in the public education system.”
Munson said she’s heard plenty of stories out on the campaign trail of schools falling apart, teachers and administrators leaving for other states and whole grade levels combined into single classrooms, while $250 million is spent on private school tax vouchers. “We don’t need to raise taxes to improve our schools; we need to take a look at and reprioritize where our dollars are going,” she said. “Oklahomans should feel the benefits of the tax dollars they pay.”
Congressional District 5 challenger Jena Nelson is no stranger to fighting to improve the state’s education system. Her debut on Oklahoma’s political stage was as a challenger to Ryan Walters for the state’s Superintendent of Public Education seat in 2022; prior to that, she worked as a teacher for 16 years, winning the state’s Teacher of the Year award in 2020 for her work at Deer Creek High School. Now she’s running against CD5 incumbent Stephanie Bice for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and she’s set her sights on fighting for education on a much bigger stage.
“Sec. [Linda] McMahon will get to know me on a first-name basis,” Nelson said in an email interview. “The cuts to the Department of Education must be remedied. We need oversight of our federal education dollars, and we must protect the rights of our students. [McMahon] is trying to dismantle public education in order for privatization of schools and a nationwide voucher program to be enacted.”
Nelson said, though, that education has not been the only thing on the minds of the people she’s met.
“The first issue that is affecting everyone across the district is the cost of living,” she said. “Groceries, utility bills, gas prices and more are causing people of the 5th District to struggle.”
She told the Oklahoma Gazette that she wants to end tariffs put into place by the president, break up giant corporate monopolies “that control everything from our food to entertainment,” and overturn the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which she said would “return the $7 billion that will be cut from Oklahoma hospitals.”
In a similar fashion, everyone N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas has talked to has also been hurt by the affordability crisis. “Affordability is something that is facing, I think, a lot of Americans, but really within [Oklahoma] because we are a low cost of living state,” she said via Zoom interview. “And so when prices start driving up and we don’t have the workforce, nor do we have the capacity to keep affording all of these goods or necessities because of the fact that we have corporations that keep raising the price due to greed, we start having issues with also housing, we start having issues with affording the food. We have issues with, you know, being able to survive and not just not thrive, but just surviving in general.”
Thomas, who decided she wanted to run for something last year and jumped at the chance to run for Oklahoma’s second U.S. Senate seat after incumbent Markwayne Mullin left office to become the Secretary of Homeland Security, also sees a major desire for change across the board. “I’m seeing people want something different,” she said. “I’m seeing people actually want someone who works for them and not against them.” For her, “different” means being someone who will help hungry kids eat well at school and protect the state’s agricultural industry and water table from the proliferation of data centers, as well as someone who can help fund hospitals and provide residents with more transparency about how their money is working within the government.
Transparency is also one of the primary goals for Nick Coffey, the Democratic pick for Attorney General.
Coffey brings his background as a federal prosecutor to bear, pledging to root out corruption in state government and keep Oklahoma kids safe from threats like gun violence, drugs and unsafe online spaces. He also wants to make sure that state agencies, politicians and corporations don’t unfairly take money from Oklahomans’ pockets to put into their own. And through it all, he told the Oklahoma Gazette he’s determined to operate as an attorney and not a politician himself.
“When I wrapped up the biggest drug conspiracy trial in decades in the Western District of Oklahoma last April, it was a group that had been flooding Oklahoma with liquid meth for years. An operation worth tens of millions of dollars,” he said. “When I finished that trial and I looked out at the people, particularly the front runner for Attorney General, and realized it was somebody that has never tried a jury trial before, I mean, that’s insane.”
Coffey wants to return the AG office to a state outside partisan politics, one where going after insurance companies for denying valid claims, or holding the state’s power utilities and private data center companies accountable, or charging violent police or politicians with crimes they committed, isn’t considered “political.” To him, these are all simply functions of a working AG office. And when he’s done with this work? “I don’t have any interest in a long-term political career,” he said. “I’m still relatively young. I want to have my own legal practice, so I’m not going to be making decisions like ‘OK, how do I stay in office for 12, 16 years?’ No, that’s just not in the cards for me. So how can I do the most amount of good for the people of Oklahoma in a short amount of time and then be done and go back to private life, you know?”
Voters have until Oct. 9 to register to vote in the Nov. 3 midterms, and until Oct. 19 to request absentee ballots. Voting begins at 7 AM on Nov. 3 and you can vote early at your county election board office starting at 8 AM on Thursday, Oct. 29.
This article appears in Thunder Season Preview.