Visit www.declinetosignok.com to learn more about SQ 836.

Activists are calling for Oklahomans to junk the state’s current primary election system and instead replace it with a California-style “jungle” or “open” primary, claiming that will produce more “moderate” candidates for the general election.

And what kind of candidates do those activists view as more moderate? In several notable cases, open-primary activists have openly supported a Marxist for president.

Records show that top officials with the group Open Primaries, which is working to change Oklahoma’s primary system to duplicate California elections, previously worked on the presidential campaign of Lenora B. Fulani.

According to Influence Watch, Open Primaries President John Opdycke “has worked for independent and radical-left political candidates and organizations throughout his career. In the late 1980s, he worked as a researcher for the lobbying arm of the Rainbow Coalition, a left-of-center political alliance organized by Jesse Jackson. In 1992, he worked on the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, an avowed Marxist of the New Alliance Party. Opdycke then worked for Fulani again two years later when she unsuccessfully opposed Gov. Mario Cuomo (D-NY) in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary.”

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

But under the proposed State Question 836, all Oklahoma candidates—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—would be placed on a single primary ballot with all voters participating. The two candidates receiving the most votes would then proceed to the general-election ballot. That would largely mirror California elections, where voters’ November choices are often limited to two Democrats and no Republicans.

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

An out-of-state organization, Open Primaries, is a major player in that effort and lists Oklahoma as one of the state campaigns it is backing, stating that the Oklahoma effort “builds on ten years of conversations and organizing in the Sooner state.”

According to the group’s website, Open Primaries Senior Vice President Jeremy Gruber was present at the Oklahoma state Capitol when the petition for SQ 836 was submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office for approval, and the group declares that it is “proud to support and champion the Vote Yes 836 campaign.”

Opdycke is not the only Open Primaries official with ties to Fulani.

Cathy Stewart, national organizing director for Open Primaries, and Gwen Mandell, the group’s director of leadership development, were both involved in Fulani’s independent presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992, according to their posted bios on the Open Primaries website.

David Belmont, a member of the Open Primaries board, was also involved in Fulani’s presidential campaigns.

Fulani’s presidential campaign focused on support for abortion and claims that police officers “are allowed to get away with racial violence and murder,” among other issues.

In a 2016 column, Cassia Roth, who holds a PhD in Latin American History with a Concentration in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, described Fulani’s New Alliance Party as “a socialist, grassroots organization with ties to the International Workers Party.”

In 2002, the New York Post reported that Fulani had been “accused of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and fraud,” and was a “quasi-Marxist.”

The Post reported that in the 1970s, Fulani “met her mentor, Fred Newman. A self-styled Marxist and founder of ‘social therapy,’ Newman for years had run a variety of leftist groups, including the International Workers Party. In 1979, Fulani and Newman formed the New Alliance Party, and joined sides with a variety of controversial characters, including Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton.”

The Post reported that officials at the Anti-Defamation League claimed Fulani had said that Jews “had to sell their souls to acquire Israel and are required to do the dirtiest work of capitalism—to function as mass murderers of people of color—in order to keep it.”

Photo credit: Eric Risberg via Associated Press