There aren’t any blue counties in Oklahoma. All 77 counties voted for Trump both times he ran. And he scored over 65% in both races. Biden, who scored less than 10% of the vote in several counties, did best in the 3 most prosperous counties which are also the counties with the better educated voters:
Oklahoma- 48.1%
Cleveland- 41.6%
Tulsa- 40.9%
Cleveland County home to the University of Oklahoma, has a significant proportion of residents with higher levels of educational attainment than any other county in the state.
Oklahoma has one of the reddest legislatures in the country— 40 Republicans and 8 Democrats in the state Senate and 81 Republicans and 20 Dems in the state House. With the departure of Joy Hofmeister as Superintendent of Public Education, there are no Democrats anywhere in the state government. She was replaced by MAGA freak Ryan Walters this year, the QAnon asshole who made up cat litter boxes in schools hoax during the campaign, very much appealing Oklahoma’s huge population of functional illiterates, a majority of the voters. He beat Democrat Jena Nelson with 57% of the vote yelling about woke nonsense all through the campaign. Basically, Walters is an anti-education extremist who obsesses on bathroom use by transgender students, Critical Race Theory and porn in school library books. He was a speaker last week at the Nazi meeting Moms for Liberty held in Philadelphia, where he ranted and raved about teachers unions and called for the elimination of the US Department of Education.
On Thursday, Walters spoke at the Norman Central Library. Norman is the county seat of Cleveland County. With people protesting the events outside the library as he arrived the event didn’t go well. As he entered the crowded meeting room for his talk, he was roundly booed; he wound up attacking the audience as members of the “radical left.” The meeting was run by a hostile Republican Party official picking fights with the audience and calling for a deputy to come and escort people out of the room. One woman had a laugh track on her phone she kept playing when Walters went off on his crazy QAnon nonsense.
The question and answer session after his speech was hilarious, someone even bringing a college text book about Critical Race Theory, nearly causing Walters to discombobulate. Soon after, when asked about enforcing transgender rights in schools, Walters said “No child should be targeted.” Someone shouted, “Well my child was assaulted because of your rhetoric!” Walters started comparing teachers unions to terrorist groups and an audience member asked why a politician who thinks it’s a good idea to ban books thought a library would be a good place to speak.
Probably the funniest/saddest part of his lunatic rant was when he claimed the infamous Tulsa race massacre wasn’t about race. Reporting for the New Republic, Tori Otten wrote that “Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction thinks that schools should teach students about the Tulsa race massacre, so long as teachers don’t actually acknowledge that the white supremacist attack was about race. ‘I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist,’ Walters said… The attackers, some of whom had been deputized and armed by city officials, murdered Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses [in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, the “Black Wall Street”] over the course of two days. The massacre is considered one of the worst incidents of racially motivated violence in U.S. history.”
Mark Wingfield reported that “University of Oklahoma social scientist Samuel Perry tweeted in response to a report of what Walters said of the race massacre: ‘My wife (a teacher) and I attended this event tonight. This was just the tip of the iceberg of idiocy Walters spewed. Driving home we felt so angry and embarrassed we live in a state where people elected this ignorant and incompetent clown.’”