Nearly 70 percent of Republicans gave Kevin a thumbs-up for a second term as governor even though the only ways he’s made this a top-ten state is if you’re counting from the bottom.

Nearly 70 percent of Republicans gave Kevin a thumbs-up for a second term as governor even though the only ways he’s made this a top-ten state is if you’re counting from the bottom.


Just shy of a quarter-million Republicans cast a ballot in his favor while just over 110,000 ballots were cast among three other candidates, according to the state election board.


But at least they showed up, or at least nearly a third of registered ones did.


Even hot on the heels of a polarizing event like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, fewer than a quarter of registered Democrats did. That’s being generous and not lumping a single one of the 380,000 independent voters into those tallies, even though the Democratic primaries were open to them once again.


Hell, they couldn’t even get an actual Democrat in the gubernatorial race, with nearly 61 percent of voters picking former Republican Joy Hofmeister over the progressive former state senator Connie Johnson.


And it’s not like the opposition has heads to spare, with more than 40,000 Democrats here jumping ship from the party between 2020 and 2022, while the Republicans picked up more than 110,000 new registrations.


If that sounds defeatist, maybe it is. But if you combine the number of Democrats with independent voters, they would total 48.6 percent of the state’s voters compared to the 50.6 percent the Republicans have if every single voter turned out.


It will only take a few more election cycles before Oklahoma decisively ceases to be the “our land” of Woody Guthrie fame and hoists its flag as the Trump Party headquarters.

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