Oklahoma's Inelasticity

[AtorBoltox]

It is fairly obvious why Oklahoma is such an overwhelmingly Republican state. What interests me though is that in the past 5 elections the GOP vote has consistently stayed stable around the 65-66% mark. 2008 is main question mark in my mind. Every other safe Republican state in the plains and the West swung to Obama to some degree, yet OK basically didn't move at all. Are there any explanations for why the state is so rigidly ineleastic?

[If my soul was made of stone]

There was still a ton of room to fall in Little Dixie in 2008, which blunted the movement elsewhere. Coal County, for instance, which had only voted for a Republican presidential candidate once ever (Nixon '72) before Dubya, had the biggest swing of any county towards either party in that election, swinging 40 points towards McCain. The Democratic vote share in places like that is still in free-fall, although the party retains a huge voter registration edge and some local positions. Oklahoma suburbs have also been historically very white, conservative, and inelastic, which given the decentralized nature of the state's two main metros also eats into the gains from the urban areas themselves.

[TML]

Another thing to note is that OK has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. Political analysts believe that this is because most elections in this state aren’t competitive. I don’t know how differently the state would vote with higher voter turnout, but I suspect that the relatively low turnout may contribute to its inelasticity.