Oklahoma's Presidential Vote Draws Attention

Oklahoma's vote in the presidential election continues to draw national interest.

All 77 of the state's counties went for John McCain over Barack Obama, the only state in which Obama lost every county, and the state gave Obama his third-lowest vote percentage.

Those facts, in light of Obama's national victory, have not been lost on others. The New York Times, Southern Political Report and others have reported on it.

Here's an excerpt from The Times' story: “Oklahoma Democrats, with very few exceptions, are the old-line white Southern Democrats,” said David Ray, another political scientist at the university (of Oklahoma). “They don’t like liberals or liberalism.”

Indeed, the state has a political landscape closely resembling that of the old solidly Democratic South, especially in its southeastern corner, known as Little Dixie, where many Southerners settled after the Civil War. When conservatives of the Old South began abandoning the party decades ago, Oklahoma’s Democrats lagged behind the historical trend. Further, the state has relatively small black and Hispanic populations, and so the Democrats did not absorb as many new voters from those groups as in the states of the old Confederacy.

These days Oklahoma Democrats dread running for local office in presidential election years, for fear of being associated with liberal nominees at the top of the ticket.

“Being liberal in Oklahoma, with the exception of a few legislative districts, will not get you elected,” said State Representative Joe Dorman, a conservative Democrat.

Ivan Holmes, chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, said there had been no ballot initiative or outcry on any state or local issue that would explain why conservatives of both parties rejected many Democratic candidates this week.

But, Mr. Holmes said, Mr. Obama was badly hurt in the state by rumors that he was not a Christian, that he sympathized with terrorists and that he would take away people’s firearms, a buzz that could not have helped Democrats down the ticket.

In addition, Senator James M. Inhofe, the Republican incumbent, whipped up anti-liberal sentiment in his successful race against a Democratic challenger, State Senator Andrew Rice, accusing him of being “too liberal for Oklahoma” in opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and voting against tax cuts.

Another Republican, State Representative Sally Kern, who recently declared that homosexuality was a greater threat to the nation than terrorism, easily won re-election.

But Mr. (Keith) Gaddie said that perhaps the most important factor in Mr. McCain’s strong showing here was religion. An Edison/Mitofsky exit poll found that more than half of Oklahoma voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and that a heavy majority of them had voted for Mr. McCain.

Mr. Gaddie, himself a pollster as well as a college professor, said: “A question we always ask in our polls is ‘How often do you attend church services?’ If a Democrat is not going to vote for a Democrat, they are a frequent church attender.”

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