Having seen many of their preferred policies impeded by constitutional restrictions and/or popular opposition, some left-wing groups are now focusing their efforts on installing liberal judges on state supreme courts across the country, believing replacement liberal justices will uphold laws that others have struck down.

In May, officials with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Vote announced that the two groups would be spending at least $5 million on state supreme court races across the country.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the effort to replace current state supreme court justices was driven in part by the group’s desire to promote issues such as abortion and “LGBTQ+ equality.”

Johnson complained that some state courts have upheld state abortion restrictions and were “denying transgender people their dignity.” The latter phrase appears to be a reference to state laws such as those that prevent children from undergoing sex-change operations or being supplied with cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers before the age of 18.

Oklahoma is among the states with laws preventing children from being subjected to those practices, and a growing number of medical providers and organizations have begun endorsing that stance.

Officials with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes said the two groups would be targeting state supreme court justices facing voters in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

Oklahoma was not on that list, possibly because the Oklahoma Supreme Court has already been rated one of the most consistently liberal in the country.

Data published in the December 2023 edition of the journal “State Politics & Policy Quarterly,” a publication of the American Political Science Association, examined the “party-adjusted surrogate judge ideology” scores (referred to as PAJID) for state judges from 1970 to 2019.

PAJID is a surrogate measure for a given judge’s political preferences based on several factors. Under the system, the higher a judge’s score, the more liberal the judge’s ideology.

Researchers were able to compile updated PAJID scores for state supreme court justices serving between 1970 and 2019, compiling a dataset with 17,092 unique justice-year observations.

Researchers found a “strong, positive correlation between a justice’s PAJID score and partisanship.”

The median state supreme court PAJID score in Oklahoma was between 70 and 75, reflecting a strong liberal slant, throughout almost the entirety of the 49-year period reviewed, only dipping slightly in recent years.

Only Hawaii, West Virginia, and Maryland had supreme courts whose justices’ median PAJID score was as liberal as Oklahoma’s throughout the entirety of the 1970-to-2019 period reviewed.

This year the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs has created what may be the most comprehensive judicial review site in state history, providing information on members of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The Oklahoma Judicial Scorecard can be viewed at https://ocpathink.org/judicial-scorecard.