What Oklahoma Almost Had

I was sitting in a restaurant with my family tonight when my phone started buzzing. Between bites, under the table, I kept checking. One by one, the Associated Press called Oklahoma's races: the governor's office, the Senate seat, the House seats, district after district. One by one, they went the way Oklahoma races have gone for most of my life. Somewhere around the time the check came, I stopped pretending to follow the dinner conversation.

The one that hurts most hasn't officially been called. I'm writing this just hours later, and House District 86 is still technically open. But the projections aren't kind, and I've watched enough election nights to know what that usually means. Hannah Cole is very likely not going to Oklahoma City in January.

District 86 Results

I want to sit with that for a minute before I get to the part where I tell you it's going to be okay, because what we almost had matters.

District 86 covers parts of Adair, Cherokee, Delaware and Mayes counties, some of the most beautiful and most overlooked country in this state. It's the kind of place where the nearest doctor can be an hour's drive away, where rural schools stretch every dollar, and where the houses sit so far apart that knocking on doors is an act of endurance.

Hannah Cole knocked on them anyway, a 33-year-old geriatric nurse from Rose, she took on Rep. David Hardin, who has held the seat since 2018. She didn't run on slogans. She ran on the distance between home and a doctor. She ran on funding rural schools well enough that kids here get a real future, not just a diploma. She ran on protecting the land and water that make northeast Oklahoma what it is. And she has said it was watching voucher money flow mostly toward wealthier families that finally pushed her to run.

That's what we could have had: someone who spent her working life caring for our elders, carrying that same patience and practicality into the Capitol. Someone who would have answered to Rose and Stilwell and Tahlequah before she answered to anyone else.

District 86 wasn't the only loss. Cyndi Munson, the Democratic leader in the Oklahoma House, grew up in a single-parent military family in Lawton. She ran for governor on the things people here actually talk about at the kitchen table: what it costs to get by, public schools, and whether you can see a doctor. She reminded us that in more than half of Oklahoma's counties, women can't find an OB-GYN, and she pushed back on tax cuts aimed at the wealthy. Tonight, Mike Mazzei was projected to beat her. (AP)

Leader Munson and I

The rest of the ballot followed. Nick Coffey, a 34-year-old fifth-generation Oklahoman, left his job as a federal prosecutor to run for attorney general because he believed corruption had taken root in our elected offices, and he wanted an Office of Public Integrity to root it out. Jon Echols declared victory over him tonight. Dr. Kelly Forbes, a career educator who started teaching in 2008, wanted to turn the lieutenant governor's office into one that actually goes out and represents people. The AP projected T.W. Shannon the winner. I'm disappointed in every one of these races. I think a lot of us are, and that's fair.

Nick Coffey and I

Then my phone buzzed again. This time it was a CNN notification, and the news was different: Democrats are projected to win control of both the U.S. House and the Senate. Even Texas is projected to send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1988. Change is possible, even in places everyone has written off.

CNN Notification

Campaigns like this one don't end when the AP makes its call. Every door Cole knocked on was a conversation that actually happened. Every neighbor who heard someone talk seriously about rural health care for the first time, every NSU student who registered, volunteered or argued about this race in a dorm room: none of that gets erased by a percentage on a screen.

Districts like ours don't change in one cycle. They change because someone shows up, and then someone else does, and then the margin gets a little closer. That's how it has always worked, here and everywhere.

Two years from now there will be another ballot. The problems Cole talked about, the long drive to the clinic, the stretched-thin classroom, the creek that needs protecting, will still be here, waiting for someone to take them seriously. Some of the people reading this column might be the ones who do.

So be disappointed tonight. Then get some sleep. The work that made this race worth caring about doesn't need a winner to keep going. It just needs us.