As I sit at my kitchen table a few days post-election day reading the national and local headlines about what happened in Oklahoma on Primary Election night, I can’t help but be a little disturbed by the narrative that has emerged surrounding the results of State Question 802— a narrative that forces us to pick sides and neatly places us into one camp or the other:
Rural vs Urban
Red vs Blue
Conservative vs Progressive
Them vs Us
I’m particularly disturbed by the narrative pushed by the official Oklahoma State Democratic Party social media account and a few political pundits (you know who you are), who tried to shame rural Oklahomans for “voting against their own self-interests” after an oversimplified map published by the Tulsa World showed State Question 802 only winning 7 out of 77 counties.
Here’s a map that tells a completely different story--it shows that we actually increased support in rural counties, particularly among Stitt supporters, in all but 8 counties statewide.
The story neither the map above nor the Tulsa World map tells is just how hard it is to be on the prevailing side of a ballot measure.
Ballot measure elections are hard and wildly complicated to maneuver. The “Yes” campaign usually always has the tougher road and the “No” campaign has a huge advantage--regardless of the amount of money spent on both sides. A “Yes” campaign must run a months, even years long, strategic and meticulous campaign free from unforced errors to prevail. The “No” side simply has to come in during the closing days of the campaign and plant a tiny seed of doubt in the minds of voters to knock off support. They can start later and spend less money to do real damage to the support the yes side has spent months building with voters.
Data we’ve seen so far from this race certainly bares that out.
A benchmark poll in late April showed Yes on 802 with a pretty commanding lead. After campaigning for nearly a year we saw a slight uptick in support from the initial viability polling conducted in March of 2019 that had us at 59 percent support. We started the final phase of the campaign with 66 percent support--with about 70 days until Election Day.
Regardless of what the polling showed, we approached every decision as if we were 20 points behind. From our perspective, we always knew we had a difficult path to victory and with a decently funded opposition, things could go south fast.
We officially kicked off the final phase of the campaign the last week of May with a 21-city tour that covered every corner of the state. That very week we launched our paid television ads, dropped our first mail piece, continued our paid digital campaign and challenged our volunteers to increase the number of shifts they were already completing on the phones talking to voters.
The first track poll, a little more than three weeks out, showed our strategy was working. Our support had actually increased to 67 percent, but the research continued to show a paid opposition, even a small one, could erode support with key voters we knew we needed to retain to win.
What happened on the ground the last three weeks of the race is exactly what the polling predicted--only worse.
With 11 days to go, we started tracking nightly with Change Research and watched our lead shrink in real time each night as the opposition attacks got decidedly more partisan as Election Day drew closer.
When we began tracking, the opposition had dropped one mail piece, had a small digital buy running across multiple online platforms and was engaging in what seemed to be a robust peer-to-peer texting campaign against the measure.
The first night’s results were sobering, if not completely predictable. Our support dropped from 67 percent just 15 days prior to 59 percent with a little more than a week to go. And every night after, we continued to lose ground. Tuesday, June 30th couldn’t come fast enough.
The opposition ran a tough campaign--albeit one built on misinformation and fear--that had an impact. I’ll let the numbers in the graph below tell that story.
However, against all odds, in the middle of a pandemic, placed on a ballot designed for us to fail, when all the votes were counted, our campaign prevailed by 6500 votes statewide--by a “whisker” as many in the media reported.
So how did we do it? How did we survive a coordinated attack from a popular incumbent governor, two ultra conservative Koch-brothers funded groups, along with popular legislative leaders and the rank and file members of Oklahoma’s supermajority legislature--all actively campaigning against the measure?
Here’s how.
1. We built a movement
From day one, we made this Oklahoma’s campaign. We built the campaign from the ground up--a true grassroots army of support that showed up every time it mattered.
We had more than 150 events in 12 months time--that’s more than 10 events every month.
We gathered signatures from every single county in the state--All 77 of them.
We turned in a record number of signatures--313,000, in less than 90 days.
Our volunteers made more than 275,000 phone calls to voters from May 1st until June 30th.
We knocked more than 66,000 doors in the final week of the campaign.
We empowered our volunteers to be the backbone of our movement. We provided the training and the tools, but they persisted. They never gave up and they never doubted a win was possible. It was their determination that drove every decision in this campaign and what made our entire team committed to running a positive, aspirational campaign, built on facts. Our entire team wanted to win it for them.
2. We relied upon research and gut
We always knew our path to victory would be narrow. It became even more narrow when Governor Stitt placed us on a June Primary in the middle of a pandemic, with 70 days until Election Day.
We employed a ton of research to help us craft the right messaging. We coupled that with an aggressive field strategy and strong coalition-building. By doing so, we used both our heads (the research) and our hearts (the gut) to convince enough rural folks to come with us. Like my dad--a likely Trump supporter, who told everyone who would listen to “Do it for your grandkids. It’s the right thing to do for them.” And the residents of Waurika, in Jefferson County who nearly lost their hospital. They took the fight to save rural hospitals personally.
We earned the trust of Republican voters and convinced them to stick with us--even when party bosses told them to leave. We never took our support for our natural base on this issue, Democrats, for granted. The opposition tried to come hard at Democrats with a message of public school funding cuts, but we did our homework early and made sure voters were armed with information to combat that false narrative when the attacks started. We listened to the concerns of Independents and then made sure they had what they needed to stay with us.
At the end of the day, regardless of party, it came down to trust. We were able to convince enough Oklahomans to trust us over the politicians who’d been promising better access to healthcare for years, but hadn’t yet delivered.
3. We were innovative
We never allowed the pandemic to slow us down or be an excuse for why we couldn’t do something. When the pandemic made its way here and shut the state down in mid-March, we were in the middle of a 30 events in 30 days push. It was grueling. We got about half way through those events before we had to quickly shift everything to online. We did Zoom Healthcare Happy Hours every Thursday evening and soon our volunteers were doing them on their own.
We ran an aggressive absentee ballot program that allowed us to bank a lot of support early before the opposition began paid communication. And we partnered with Change Research, to track support for the ballot measure in the closing days which allowed us to shift our field program to ensure we were talking to the right voters and turning them out to vote.
The polling project also allowed us to go back to voters after the race was over and ask Oklahomans why they voted yes on State Question 802. Here is what they told us, in their own words.
In conclusion, Oklahomans came together. In the middle of a pandemic, when politicians failed us, we stepped up to deliver healthcare to the people of Oklahoma.
Now it’s up to all of us to make certain that politicians hold up the will of Oklahoma voters. Implementation can and should begin immediately. There is simply no reason to delay the will of voters any longer.
Medicaid Expansion must be funded and fully implemented by July 2021. Politicians can do that without raising taxes on the very people the law is intended to help and without cutting core services that Oklahoma families rely on now more than ever.
It will take politicians doing exactly what Oklahomans did throughout this entire campaign--resisting the dangerously crafted narrative about Oklahomans being divided. Instead, work to uphold the will of Oklahoma voters by coming together.