‘He needed all of it’: How Mike Mazzei’s millions helped deliver a narrow victory

Well, and then I guess just, you know, sort of a larger question.

What do you think? Are there any like people who are looking through the numbers today are trying to sort this out? Are there like obvious mistakes that you would caution people against looking into the numbers?

Looking at some local elections is probably something that the campaigns, you know, I always advise people to do.

But if you look at the turnout in counties like, for example, Ottawa County, Actually, we had 50% more people vote, 58% more people vote in the Republican primary in August than voted in June.

They had a huge larger turnout.

It's because they had a local sales tax issue that got 94% of the vote, I think it was, to...

They had their sheriff sued, and so everybody's going to have to pay this big settlement on property taxes, so they decided to pay it off with the sales tax instead.

So it meant there was a lot more people voting there in Ottawa County.

We saw the same thing in Adair County and Tahlequah, where you had some very important school bond issues that were on the ballot.

And so those were two counties that also had more people vote in August than in June.

So, you know, looking at some of those things, I think matter when you get into a race that's this close.

For me, but that's all short term.

Long term, I think one of the keys is going to be What are the metro areas, what's their involvement going to be in nominating Republicans in the future? If you just look at all...

We'll see what happens here with Cindy Munson, and I'll do respect there.

But if you look at the residents, if you look at Oklahoma, Tulsa, Cleveland, and Canadian County, they're about 48%, almost 49% of all the residents in the state.

They only accounted for 42% of the Republican primary voters.

If you change that and the fact that Drummond wins those, he might be the nominee.

Now, Oklahoma County did turn out quite a bit more in the runoff than it did in the primary.

Tulsa County did a little bit more percentage-wise.

But to me, that's a big question.

Are we going to continue to be a state where we're going to have rural dominance, even though the metro areas are becoming more populated?

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see.

I mean...

It'll be interesting to see how there is something of a divide.

It feels like it's growing over time.