Where Tuesday’s Tide Was All Republican

Hat Tip SallyKern


Where Tuesday’s Tide Was All Republican
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

OKLAHOMA CITY — The sign over the table at the Arrow Cafe in Tecumseh, a rural town southeast of this state capital, said, “World’s Problems Solved Here,” and beneath it sat five older white Democrats with their coffee, talking politics in the golden afternoon light. Only two had voted for Barack Hussein Obama for president

“I just couldn’t vote for anyone who has Hussein in his name,” joked Bob Cook, a 68-year-old poultry farmer, stretching and smiling. At the other end of the table, Jim White, 65, said he opposed abortion and so could not vote for a candidate like Mr. Obama, who favors abortion rights.

Among Oklahomans, Mr. Cook and Mr. White are hardly alone. Though the state’s Democrats still outnumber its Republicans, you would never know it by looking at the election results. Oklahoma voters went for Senator John McCain by almost two to one, bucking the tide that swept Mr. Obama to the presidency. Not a single one of the state’s 77 counties backed Mr. Obama, despite his endorsement by the popular Democratic governor, Brad Henry.

Chris Benge, left, Oklahoma House speaker, and Glenn Coffee, Senate Republican leader, celebrated control of both houses.

Oklahoma Republicans also made significant gains down the ticket. They picked up two seats in the State Senate and four in the Oklahoma House, giving them a majority in both houses of the Legislature for the first time in the state’s century-long history.

In addition, the party hung on to a United States Senate seat and solidly defeated challengers for the four Congressional seats held by Republicans.

“This is a consolidation of what’s been going on for a long time,” said Keith Gaddie, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma. “The systematic creep toward the Republican Party, and it’s been happening for 30 years.”

Perhaps nowhere else in the country is the conflict between Southern rural Democrats and the national Democratic Party more starkly evident than in Oklahoma, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964.

“Oklahoma Democrats, with very few exceptions, are the old-line white Southern Democrats,” said David Ray, another political scientist at the university. “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. 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.”

Another advantage for Mr. McCain was that the state’s economy, based mostly on the oil and gas industry, has been buffered somewhat from the national economic slowdown. Unemployment remains low, the housing market stable.

For all of that, the Democratic Party is far from dead in Oklahoma, especially in the state’s southeastern section, where, despite the social conservatism, many people still talk about the New Deal and revere Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Democrats currently hold not only the governorship but also most other statewide offices. And rural voters often register as Democrats because the party’s primaries for sheriff and county commissioner continue to be more important than the general elections for those posts.

But the blows of the recent past have been unmistakable. For the last 14 years, the state’s two senators, and four of its five representatives, have been Republicans. Riding President Bush’s coattails, Republicans also won control of the Oklahoma House in 2004. Now they have won the State Senate.

“If America voted for change, Oklahoma voted for reform,” State Senator Glenn Coffee, the Republican who is soon to be majority leader, said of Tuesday’s elections. “For a long time you had a single-party state.”

At the Arrow Cafe, several lifelong Democrats said they could remember a time 25 years ago when no one would admit to being a Republican, for fear of being ostracized. These days, few people advertise that they are Democrats, though Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the county by two to one.

Reflecting on the Oklahoma vote in the presidential election just past, Gordon Belshe, a 67-year-old manufacturer of trailer homes who said he had voted for Mr. Obama, suggested that racism had played a role.

“I still think we had a lot of antiblack votes in this state,” Mr. Belshe said. “I had several people ask me how I could vote for him.”

And Mr. White, the man who had said he could not vote for Mr. Obama because of the abortion issue, also acknowledged that he would not have been comfortable voting for a black candidate. “I’m prejudiced,” he whispered. “This is a problem I have to personally work through.”

In truth, it is impossible to tell if racism was a significant factor in Mr. Obama’s poor showing here. According to a statewide exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky, he got the support of 59 percent of white Democrats in the state, compared with the 84 percent he garnered from white Democrats nationwide. Four years ago, however, Senator John Kerry fared little better among white Oklahoma Democrats, getting only 62 percent.

In any event, most of the older Democrats who stopped by the cafe the other day said Mr. Obama’s race had had nothing to do with their decision to support Mr. McCain.

Mr. Cook, the poultry farmer, said Mr. Obama had been insufficiently religious for him. “He don’t believe like a lot of us do,” he said.

And Bill Straughan, a 70-year-old former civilian employee at nearby Tinker Air Force Base, said Mr. Obama “doesn’t have any real résumé.”

“McCain was a prisoner of war longer than Obama was in the Senate,” Mr. Straughan said. “The last reason I would not vote for him was because he’s black.”

This article appeared in print on November 8, 2008, on page A13 of the New York edition.