[Photo: Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt speaks onstage during Day 1 of the Clinton Global Initiative 2024 Annual Meeting at New York Hilton Midtown on September 23, 2024, in New York City.]

In a recent interview, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt dismissed Oklahoma’s statewide elected officials as “bitterly unpopular” while claiming he and other Oklahoma City leaders have achieved historic levels of support.

Yet election records show the statewide officials Holt dismisses as astoundingly unpopular received far more votes in Oklahoma City precincts than Holt did in his most recent reelection campaign.

In a December interview with KOCO News 5, Oklahoma City’s ABC affiliate, Holt urged Oklahomans to adopt a California-style election system that eliminates party primaries and instead places all candidates from all parties on a single ballot.

He said that system, which is similar to the election method used for nonpartisan city elections in Oklahoma, produces much better officeholders.

“You look at the state level, you know? You have bitterly unpopular elected leaders, you have bitterly unpopular actions and behaviors year after year after year,” Holt said.

In contrast, Holt said California-style elections are “producing what everyone in Oklahoma agrees to be the greatest governance we’ve ever seen.”

While the founding fathers of the United States may be revered, Holt said California-style elections in Oklahoma City have “produced some of the greatest success in governance in American history.”

But if Oklahoma City residents believe Holt’s tenure as mayor represents the “greatest governance” in history, it isn’t translating into citizens flooding the polls to support Holt.

In the Feb. 8, 2022, Oklahoma City mayoral election, there were only 60,785 votes cast. Holt received only 36,355 votes out of that total. In Oklahoma County precincts, Holt received 30,260 votes. (The remainder of Holt’s total came from Oklahoma City precincts in Cleveland and Canadian counties.)

In contrast, in the general election on Nov. 8, 2022, Gov. Kevin Stitt received 50,327 votes in Oklahoma City precincts within Oklahoma County—meaning that Stitt received 66 percent more votes from Oklahoma City residents in Oklahoma County than Holt did.

During the KOCO interview, Holt decried the tenure of former State Superintendent Ryan Walters.

“What we saw at the State Department of Education the last three or four years, where would you put that on an ideological spectrum?” Holt said. “That was insanity.”

Yet when Walters ran for state superintendent in 2022, he also outperformed Holt when it came to actual votes.

Walters received 52,105 votes in Oklahoma County’s Oklahoma City precincts in the November 2022 election—72 percent more votes than what Holt received in those areas in his mayoral race that year.

Holt made his comments disparaging statewide officeholders while urging voters to support proposed State Question 836.

Oklahoma’s current election system allows Republican voters to pick Republican nominees in party primaries, as Democratic voters do the same in their primaries. The two parties’ candidates then face off in the November general election along with any independent candidates who file.

But under the proposed State Question 836, all Oklahoma candidates—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—would be placed on a single ballot with all voters casting ballots. The two candidates receiving the most votes would then proceed to the November general election, even if they are both members of the same political party.

That would largely mirror California elections, where even statewide races have involved only two Democratic candidates.

Election records show that if the California system had been used for Oklahoma elections, nearly every open-seat gubernatorial race won by a Republican in state history would have instead been a Democrat-versus-Democrat general election.

An initiative-petition effort is underway to collect 172,993 valid signatures to place SQ 836 on the ballot in Oklahoma.

Numerous Oklahoma conservatives, at both the state and federal levels, have come out in strong opposition to SQ 836. In contrast, many of the backers of SQ 836 have longstanding ties to Democratic candidates and left-wing causes, and one of the major organizations backing the effort is based in New York.

Holt has been among the most high-profile officeholders to support SQ 836. During his tenure as mayor, Holt has often endorsed left-wing policies despite being a registered Republican, such as touting transgenderism and similar sexual “identities” and promoting controversial “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that critics say have fueled institutional racism, including growing anti-Semitism on college campuses. When researchers have examined DEI trainings, they found that many increased prejudice.

During his interview with KOCO, Holt claimed that Oklahoma’s longstanding election system, which is used in nearly all states throughout the country aside from California and Washington, empowers a small minority of voters at the expense of the majority.

“The entire state of Oklahoma doesn’t really choose who the governor is, or who our U.S. senators are, or other officials,” Holt said. “It happens in this closed partisan primary process. Oftentimes, the most important decision is made in an August runoff by the narrowest of people.”

Holt dismissed Oklahoma voters who participate in runoff elections as “extreme.”

However, election records show that the California system would give outsized power to a very small share of the electorate that may be at odds with the majority.

In 2018, Stitt became Oklahoma’s fifth Republican governor, receiving a little over 54 percent of the vote to the 42 percent received by Democratic nominee Drew Edmondson and 3.4 percent that went to Libertarian Chris Powell.

But under the California model, that year’s election would have been a Democrat-only affair.

In Oklahoma’s 2018 gubernatorial race, there were 10 candidates who filed to run as Republicans and two who filed to run as Democrats. In the June 2018 primary, 452,606 Oklahomans cast a vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidate compared to just 395,494 votes cast for a Democrat.

But under SQ 836’s California model, the November ballot that year would have pitted Edmondson against fellow Democrat Connie Johnson with no Republican option. Because the Republican vote was split 10 ways in the primary, no GOP candidate received more votes than the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary.

In that year’s primaries, Edmondson received 242,764 votes while Johnson received 152,730. The top finisher in the Republican primary, which went to a runoff, received only 132,806 votes.

There were 2,048,905 registered voters in Oklahoma as of May 31, 2018. Under the California election system favored by Holt, only the 395,494 individuals who voted for the two Democratic candidates in that year’s primary elections would have selected that year’s general-election candidates, or just 19 percent of registered voters.

Holt’s own mayoral race also demonstrates how the California system empowers a very small minority of voters. In his 2022 re-election race, Holt was selected by just 36,355 voters.

At the time of the 2022 mayoral election, there were 357,842 people registered to vote in Oklahoma City, according to The Journal Record.

That means Holt was reelected mayor with the support of only 10.1 percent of eligible voters. The remaining 89.9 percent either cast a ballot for one of Holt’s opponents or did not vote at all.

In contrast, the most recent state gubernatorial race in 2022 drew 50.35 percent of eligible voters.

[Photo credit: Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Clinton Global Initiative.]

 

NOTE: The next-to-last paragraph has been updated since initial publication.