Dems flip County Commission seat in Trump+81 county

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

https://twitter.com/Blake_Allen13/status/1668795854184955907?t=4kLXniPDEsZG0pNhW...


Of course, this gives about as much insight as Rs winning nonpartisan races for Mayor in Columbia or McAllen, but since we had people making threads about those dooming over D chances in 2022...

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This isn't even an ancestrally D county. Carter won it but LBJ only did by about 5 points and it voted against FDR twice.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What happened?

[Lambsbread]

Biden should make this Flint Farris fellow his VP. Oklahoma -> Safe D in that case.

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

What happened?

Locally known family apparently, and Farris ran as a very conservadem.

https://twitter.com/Blake_Allen13/status/1668809288817467396?s=20

[Skill and Chance]

For whatever reason, Oklahoma Dems are extremely good at special elections compared to the presidential or even gubernatorial baseline.  I remember when they flipped a Trump +20 suburban state senate seat near Tulsa a few years back with an openly lesbian candidate.

[Vosem]

In the 1910s this was a relatively strong county for the Socialist Party; in 1912 Debs came within 10 points of winning it (37% Taft, 36% Wilson, 27% Debs; Roosevelt was not on the ballot in OK) and in 1916 Benson came within single-digits (37% Wilson, 33% Benson, 29% Hughes). Possible resurgence?

The county was initially very Republican by Oklahoma standards, but returned an insane 78-22 FDR landslide in 1932. It then trended very Republican at every FDR-era election and voted against him outright in 1940/1944, and has since been generally more Republican than the state, barely voting LBJ in 1964. (It was double-digit Carter in 1976, but that was a weird fluke before being Reagan+40 in 1980, and Clinton never came close). More recently, it's been uber-Republican even by Oklahoma standards; it was 87-10 Trump in 2016, and then swung further right to 90-9 Trump in 2020.

(Population peaks here were long ago: the candidate who received the most votes here ever was in fact FDR 1932, and the Republican who received the most votes was Willkie. That said, Trump 2020 posted a best-since-1952 raw vote performance. The 1930 Census recorded the highest-ever population and it has since gradually fallen, with tiny bumps in 1980 and 2010 not canceling out earlier falls.)

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

When you get to this small scale partisan elections, party labels more or less fall apart. I know in my county a couple candidates who run as one party or another more or less as a strategy to avoid primaries. Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened here. I know someone who did this exact thing for county council.

[Ferguson97]

What happened?

Locally known family apparently, and Farris ran as a very conservadem.

https://twitter.com/Blake_Allen13/status/1668809288817467396?s=20

This looks like the kind of junk mail flyer I'd get advertising a discount at a mattress store. I love it.