GOP Senate candidates to meet in live, televised debate on Thursday

Five of the thirteen Republicans running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Jim Inhofe will be featured in a live, commercial-free debate hosted by OKC's News 9 and Tulsa's News on 6 this Thursday at 7pm.

Luke Holland for Senate ad: "My Prayer for America"

Luke Holland, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe's personally anointed successor, is out with the following ad for his U.S. Senate campaign. Watch, and then read my comments afterwards.

First fundraising reports for U.S. Senate, CD2 candidates

Candidate filing has concluded, and at the same time the first campaign fundraising reports are available for some of the leading candidates for federal office. In this post, I'm going to briefly cover the fundraising figures for the GOP U.S. Senate and U.S. House candidates that have filed their first quarter reports.

Super PAC drops $500k into ads for Inhofe's hand-picked successor, Luke Holland

From The Frontier journalist Reese Gorman on Twitter:

Okieway, a Super PAC backing @LukeHollandOK , has started a nearly $500,000 media buy in support of Holland. The slogan: “Jim Inhofe, continued”

I hate to break it to them, but this seems to be a surefire way to set money on fire for no purpose. Holland may be a nice guy, but - nobody knows him, he's a lifelong government bureaucrat, he's in a multicandidate race with some heavy hitters, and Inhofe's arrogant way of setting him forward as the handpicked successor (along with weird comments about Holland having been the real Senator) is off-putting.

Poll: Lankford, Stitt, Mullin lead respective races by large margins

Here's the latest poll of the Oklahoma election landscape, from Amber Integrated.

Key takeaways:

• U.S. Sen. James Lankford leads Jackson Lahmeyer. Massively.
• Gov. Kevin Stitt leads Mark Sherwood in the GOP primary (massively) and holds a consistent 14% lead over RINO-turned-Democrat Joy Hofmeister in the general.
• U.S. Rep. Markwayne Mullin has the very early lead in the U.S. Senate special election. 
• Voters don't care about COVID.

Amber Integrated Releases Survey on Upcoming Primary and General Elections

OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma-based public affairs firm Amber Integrated has released two surveys measuring attitudes about the current political environment and the upcoming primary and general elections in Oklahoma.

The first of these surveys was conducted from March 24-27, 2022 and included a pool of 455 likely GOP primary voters in Oklahoma.  It has a margin of error of 4.59% at a 95% confidence interval. 

The second of these surveys was also conducted from March 24-27, 2022, and included a pool of 500 likely general election voters in Oklahoma. This survey has a margin of error of 4.38% at a 95% confidence interval. 

Toplines and crosstabs for both surveys are available here.

Some key observations from both surveys are below:

Inhofe endorses his own chief-of-staff to replace him in special election

Following his announcement that he would be retiring, thus triggering a special election this year, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe endorsed his chief-of-staff Luke Holland as his hand-picked successor in office (more on that in a bit).

A Bartlesville native, Holland has served as Inhofe's top aide since 2017. His first introduction to Sen. Inhofe came, apparently, from Jim Inhofe's daughter, who was one of Holland's professors at the University of Arkansas. He first joined Inhofe's staff in 2009.

Inhofe was unable to attend Holland's press conference due to testing positive for COVID-19, but lent his endorsement over the phone at the event.