Ugh. How sickening.

This article in NOTUS about that ad in the Oklahoma Governors race is interesting. It discusses a difference in approaches among the MAGA right in the upcoming election. On the one side is ... that. On the other is the slightly less crazy approach favored by the current Governor Kevin Stitt who has actually bucked the president from time to time:

When I interviewed McCall in late January, I asked him about the banana ad. A law enacted in 2023, when McCall was House speaker, expressly prohibits gender-transition procedures for minors. Was there an effort underway to roll back the bill? Did the state need to pass an even more stringent prohibition? "There are a lot of people in the state of Oklahoma that are concerned about those value issues, and they want to know where you stand on them," he responded. "It's not the only thing we are talking about and have been talking about, but that's important to the Republican electorate."

Polling suggests he isn't exactly wrong. In a January survey conducted by Oklahoma pollster Cole Hargrave Snodgrass and Associates, 53% of likely Republican primary voters said cultural issues such as banning Sharia law and transgender surgeries for youth would be vital when deciding which candidate to support. Just 39% said those topics were less important than day-to-day government functions, namely public education, tax policy and infrastructure.

And yet the favorite in the Republican primary, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, is taking a different tack. To be clear, Drummond is no centrist. He has frequently voiced support for the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts and criticized the current governor, Kevin Stitt -- who is barred by term limits from running again -- for collaborating with the Biden administration to resettle hundreds of Afghan refugees in 2021.

But Drummond also believes McCall has overestimated voters' appetite for culture-war issues. The electorate, he maintains, is more interested in quality-of-life questions, like improving the state's abysmal public education rankings and reining in soaring homeowner-insurance rates. "Right now in Oklahoma, you cannot wake up a male yesterday and wake up a female today and compete in sports," Drummond told me in February. "It's not permissible today to chop your banana in two as a minor. Now, if you want to have gender-altering surgery as an 18-year-old, knock yourself out. I don't think it's a good idea, but these issues that one candidate is promoting are really solved issues."

As I mentioned, the current Governor takes the second tack. He's the president of the Governor's association and is the one who told Trump that Republicans would not attend if he didn't invite the Democrats to the White House as is long-standing tradition. Trump backed down. Maybe Oklahoma is not as anti-woke as the rest of the red states but that would be interesting in itself. Why would that be? It's as Republican as they come.

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