A woman living in rural Oklahoma told us the nearest hospital is 30 minutes from her house. The cuts to Medicaid had just come through and she wasn’t worried about what had already happened – she was worried about what hadn’t happened yet. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet,” she said. “And that’s what I’m afraid of.”
A 60-year-old woman, also living in rural Oklahoma, put it more bluntly. “House and insurance prices have gone through the roof. I believe the American dream is dead and now we just fight to survive.”
And a 68-year-old man in Tulsa, at the end of a long conversation about everything wrong with the way this state is run, said the thing we keep coming back to: “Show me your integrity and I’ll vote for you. Even if you’re not the party I generally vote for.”
These three people don’t vote the same way. They don’t live in the same part of the state. But they said almost the same thing and so did nearly everyone else we talked to earlier this year.
This year This Land Research and Communications Collaborative did the most thorough listening project we’ve ever undertaken. Two statewide surveys of nearly 2,200 likely voters followed by forty one-on-one text conversations, thirteen in-depth interviews, and a 90-minute focus group. We didn’t start with a message and go looking for people to agree with it. We started with a simple question: what do Oklahomans actually want from their state?
Here is what they told us.
They are falling behind. Nearly 70 percent of Oklahomans say their income isn’t keeping up with the cost of living. That number doesn’t move much whether you ask people in the city or in rural parts of the state. It doesn’t change if they are young or old, or if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Libertarian. A full Eighty-three percent, over 3/4s of the state, say groceries have gotten harder to afford in the last two years and 71 percent say the same about their home insurance and their utility bills.
The phrase people used, over and over, without anybody prompting them, was “they’re taking advantage of us.”
They are tired of watching politicians get away with running the state like it only belongs to them. Nearly half of Oklahomans put holding politicians accountable at the very top of their list for this election, tied with the cost of living. And the thing that bothers them most isn’t any one scandal, it’s the pattern of scandal after scandal. “I am sick of fraud being found and no one goes to jail,” one woman told us. “They won’t hold each other accountable. How can we trust them?”
They already know about the state of Oklahoma schools. We didn’t have to tell a single person that Oklahoma ranks near the bottom of the country in education. They told us. Fiftieth in the nation has become something close to common knowledge here, and people know exactly whose job it was to prevent that.
The people we spoke with want their vote to mean something. Some of the angriest people we talked to weren’t angry about a policy. They were angry that they’d gone to the polls, made a decision on a state question, and then watched politicians spend years trying to undo it. “The people voted,” a 62-year-old man said. “Respect it.”
And underneath all of it was something we didn’t expect to hear so consistently: these people love our state. Not one person told us they wanted to leave. The angriest people in our research were the ones trying hardest to fix it. They talked about Oklahoma the way you talk about family: frustrated, disappointed, sometimes furious, and not going anywhere.
That’s what we mean when we say Oklahoma is ours.
It isn’t a slogan. It’s a fact that the people who run this state have gotten comfortable forgetting. Every office that decides what your light bill looks like, whether your kid’s teacher stays or leaves, or whether the hospital 30 minutes away is still open next year works for you . Not the other way around. And this November, you get to remind them.
We’re not going to tell you who to vote for. That’s not our job and it’s not what you asked us for. What you asked for, in more than 2,000 conversations, was for somebody to see what you see, say it plainly, and show you that it’s worth showing up for.
So for the next seven weeks, that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll share what Oklahomans told us, in their own words. We’ll show you the times this state’s voters showed up and something actually changed, because it has happened, more than once, and not that long ago. And we’ll make the practical part as easy as we can: when to register, how to get a ballot, where to go, and what to bring.
The first practical part is today. Registration for the November 3 election closes on Friday, October 9. If you’ve moved, changed your name, or aren’t sure you’re on the rolls, it takes two minutes to check at okvoterportal.okelections.gov. Do it now, while you’re thinking about it.
Oklahoma is ours. It has been the whole time. It’s time to vote like it.
