Cyndi Munson's first win, 2015

Facebook reminded me that Porter Davis's birthday would have been this week. Porter was a long-time activist in the Oklahoma Republican Party. He was on the libertarian, Ron Paul, wing of the GOP, and in fact had been the chairman of the Oklahoma Libertarian Party in the 1970s, but he seemed to get along with everyone. He served one term from 1982-1984 representing House District 85 as a Republican when it was a predominantly Democrat district. Porter died in November 2023.

Porter Davis's heart was with organizing the grassroots at the precinct level. He had a website called The Precinct Leader with his thoughts and counsel on local community organizing to effect change. The website is now offline. He had started to revive it in 2022 after a few years hiatus.

In December 2015, Davis wrote about the recent special election in House District 85 which had followed the death of State Rep. David Dank. Chip Carter, backed by PAC money and establishment consultants, won the Republican primary with 37% against Ralph Crawford and two other candidates. There was no runoff in this special election. There were nasty dark-money attacks against Crawford. Cyndi Munson had been the Democrat nominee in 2014 and had lost to Dank 44% to 56%, but she beat Carter in the 2015 special by 54% to 46%.

Davis ran the numbers and learned that the district still had a bare majority of registered Republican voters, and more Republicans than Democrats turned out to vote in the special general election, but more Republicans had turned out for the primary than voted in the general. At least 402 of the registered Republicans who turned out voted for Democrat Munson.

How did she win? Davis blames GOP division:

Munson is apparently a personable, hard worker. She was able to concentrate her efforts on converting Republican and Independent votes, while doing the basics to secure her Democrat base. She received almost 44% of the vote just six months prior to filing. But that doesn't explain the crossover. In normal times, Carter should have been able to secure the Republican base and concentrate on winning over conservative Democrats and Independents, as all previous Republican candidates have done. But that didn't happen. Why?

The truth is that the Republican crossover vote was less a vote FOR Munson and more a vote AGAINST Carter, and what he represented in the minds of the crossover voters. It was a vote against politics as usual by the Republicans.....

What turned the tide against Carter was the negative campaigning in the last ten days before the primary. Post cards, flyers, robo-calls and whispers on the doorstep slandered Ralph Crawford and tried to portray him as an Obama-supporting, budget-busting union goon. This was a deliberate misrepresentation of who Ralph Crawford is. At least one negative postcard came from the Carter campaign, while several others came from dark money groups. Indications were that Carter was trailing Crawford before his campaign went to the gutter, creating fear and doubt in the minds of enough voters to get some Crawford voters to switch or stay home.

We also heard reports of a whisper campaign slandering Crawford's wife, Laura, a two-time Teacher of the Year, in two different school districts. The slander was that she received that prestigious recognition because she was in the teachers' union. The truth is that she had never been a union member, contrary to most Oklahoma teachers.

While "going negative" is politics as usual, in this case, hundreds of people who knew, trusted and voted for Ralph Crawford, took it personally and supported Munson as a protest vote. I've heard many stories of people who were so offended, they chased Carter off their door steps while he campaigned. Many even had Munson signs in their yards, replacing the Crawford signs that were there just weeks before. Munson took full advantage of Carter's negative campaigning. (Crawford did nothing to add fuel to the fire. He didn't have to.)

My speculation is that protest votes were also fueled by a combination of disgust with politics as usual and disappointment with the GOP at both the state and local levels. At home, we have a GOP-dominated legislature whose results seem little different from the Democrats who controlled the state so long. Nationally, 62% of Republicans are upset with their own party, helping to account for the Trump phenomenon. Voting for a Democrat is a good way for a Republican to cast a protest vote.

It is worth noting that the reason many qualified men and women choose NOT to run for public office is the treatment that Ralph and Laura Crawford got. Most people are reluctant to subject themselves to the rigors of campaigning, especially when they can expect members of their own party to tear them down rather than run on their own merits. As a result, people more inclined to be politicians rather than principled statesmen run and are elected. Special interests contribute tens of thousands of dollars and expect a return on their investment.

I think back to a bruising primary campaign for Lieutenant Governor in 2006. Incumbent Mary Fallin ran for the open 5th Congressional District seat vacated by Ernest Istook, who ran for Governor. House Speaker Todd Hiett (before he became a gropey Corporation Commissioner), State Senator Scott Pruitt (later Attorney General and EPA Administrator in Trump's first term), and State Senator Nancy Riley were the Republican primary candidates. Hiett and Pruitt attacked each other relentlessly in the runoff, which Hiett won narrowly by 2 percentage points.

Hiett lost in November to House Minority Leader Jari Askins, who barely topped 50%. Independent E. Z. Million grabbed Republican voters who didn't like Hiett, receiving 2.4% of the vote. It was a terrible year for Oklahoma Republicans anyway -- Bob Anthony was the only Republican to win statewide that year -- but the bitterness of the Lieutenant Governor's primary led to the loss of a winnable seat, and a Democrat had the tie-breaking vote in a Senate tied 24-24.

Porter Davis never wrote the promised follow-up on how the Oklahoma GOP could fix the problem. The current state party organization has alienated many conservative activists and donors, so I don't see the official OKGOP encouraging comity and caution in the runoff campaign or uniting the party when the runoff is over, not after state party leaders squandered their credibility and burned so many bridges backing a creep for Congress and backing a progressive RINO for Tulsa County DA against a conservative incumbent. Claiming to have "prophetic insights," they have proven themselves to be "blind guides who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel."

2026 does not look like a good year for Republicans nationally -- midterms of a president's second term never are good for the president's party, and there are extra special challenges this year with the Iran war and high energy prices damaging the Trump brand. Both candidates in the runoff for governor will have the resources and dark-money backing to go scorched earth on each other. Republicans on the losing side of the primary may be tempted to think it would be better to have a Democrat governor checked by a Republican legislative supermajority than to have the other Republican in the governor's mansion.

Meanwhile, likeable, hardworking Cyndi Munson went on to win a full term in 2016 and every subsequent election for House 85. She just won the Democrat nomination for Governor with 75% of the vote. Munson received over 20,000 more votes (129,152) than any of the Republican candidates for governor. She can sit on the sidelines, raise money, and watch Mazzei and Drummond tear each other apart for the next two months.

Over the weekend, I hope to write about the primary election results and their fallout. I was having too much fun Tuesday night to stop to write, and I've been playing catch-up with the rest of my life since then.