Listen Frontier: Oklahoma’s largest counties are changing politically. Is it a wave or a lasting shift?

Frontier Executive Editor Dylan Goforth spoke with Oklahoma political pollster Pat McFerron about how historic gains for Democratic candidates in midterm elections played out in deep-red Oklahoma. McFerron is the president of the polling firm Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates. This is a partial transcript of the conversation. For the full interview, listen to our podcast. 

Dylan: Across the country, Democrats had a strong election night. Obviously, much has been said and written about that. Oklahoma remained solidly Republican in statewide races, but Democrats did make significant gains in some of the state’s largest counties. They flipped six Republican-held legislative seats.

When you are looking at Oklahoma’s results alongside what happened nationally, how much of that same leftward shift do you see here? Was there anything particularly unique about Oklahoma’s results compared to the national outcomes?

Pat: One of the things I want to be real careful about here is using the word “shift.” I’m not sure it’s a shift. A shift seems to intimate that it’s a permanent movement.

Yes, we saw a wave, and Oklahoma was not immune from the wave. It’s just that we’re far enough away from where Democrats were competitive that it didn’t have an electoral consequence on a statewide level.

Dylan: The way I described it was a lot of the national swing also happened in Oklahoma. Oklahoma Democrats were just way behind the starting line compared to some of the other states where Democrats made big gains.

Pat: You look at the 5th Congressional District. That’s an R-plus-nine seat by most evaluations, and it ended up being almost even.

I think there was kind of a nine-point, somewhere eight-to-10-point range wave in Oklahoma. If you look at the governor’s race, that’s about the change from four years ago, and if you look at the statewide secondary offices, yes, a significant difference from four years ago. And so I think a lot of that’s attributed to the wave.

Dylan: One of the things that stood out in our analysis at The Frontier of the election data was the movement to the left in Oklahoma County, Tulsa County, some of the suburban areas like Canadian County.

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They’re places where Republicans have traditionally relied on stronger margins, even in places like Oklahoma County, where it’s shifting even from purple to blue in the city limits.Those margins shrank on Election Day. They have been changing in the last few election cycles.

What do you think is driving that movement? Are Democrats actually winning over Republican voters? Are we seeing changes in turnout and the makeup of the electorate?

Pat: I think there’s a pendulum swing that we’re seeing happening. But I do think there’s some trajectory, especially in these metro areas that you’re talking about.

And the reality is, our metro areas are catching up. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but they are mimicking what we see in metro areas across the country.

The reality is, if you look across the country, and we’ve all seen the maps of these counties and different things dating back to 2016, or even earlier than that – the higher population density areas tend to vote more Democrat, and the rural areas tend to vote more Republican.

And we’re seeing the reality is Oklahoma City and Tulsa have been kind of outliers in that over the last 10 years, and now it’s starting to move and change in a way that we can see from an electoral standpoint.