OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt held off a tougher-than-expected problem to his reelection on Tuesday, defeating Democrat Joy Hofmeister regardless of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in assault advertisements in opposition to him.
Stitt, 49, was aided partly by a late infusion of ads from the Republican Governor’s Association that linked Hofmeister to President Joe Biden, who misplaced each one of many state’s 77 counties within the 2020 presidential election and stays unpopular within the state. The advertisements additionally criticized Hofmeister, the state’s superintendent of public faculties who switched events to run in opposition to Stitt, for supporting a sequence of tax will increase in 2018 that helped fund pay raises for lecturers.
Hofmeister, 58, had been blasting Stitt on the marketing campaign path for his voucher-style plan to divert public schooling cash to personal faculties, a difficulty that involved voters in deep-red rural swathes of the state with few private-school choices for college kids.
But Stitt, a rich mortgage firm proprietor who dumped practically $2 million of his personal cash into his marketing campaign within the closing weeks, advised voters he was making progress on his promise of 4 years in the past to enhance the state’s low rankings in lots of quality-of-life indicators. The loans to his marketing campaign boosted his complete fundraising haul to greater than $10 million, greater than triple the $3.1 million raised by Hofmeister.
He boasted of record-level state financial savings and funding for public faculties underneath his watch, and the state’s fast emergence from pandemic-related closures that helped the economic system rebound rapidly and maintain the state’s unemployment price low.
“The turnaround that you elected me to do, it is working,” Stitt advised a crowd of greater than 300 gathered on the Crossroads megachurch on Oklahoma City’s south facet for a rally final week with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. A separate rally was held with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Tulsa.
Jessica Perez, 46, forged her poll Tuesday for Stitt at Oklahoma Christian University and mentioned his oversight of the state through the pandemic appealed to her.
“It didn’t make sense to me that you could go to Home Depot, but not to church,” Perez mentioned. “I believe he’s an effective leader. What he says he’s going to do, he does.”
Stitt additionally survived a barrage of blistering assault advertisements from dark-money groups, which don’t must report their donors and spent hundreds of thousands because the June main hammering his school-voucher plan. Other advertisements highlighted his mass release of prisoners and a sequence of scandals in his administration, together with a profitable no-bid contract with a barbecue restaurant, misspent pandemic relief funds for education and his plans to construct a brand new state mansion.
The dark-money assaults on Stitt and different media boosting Hofmeister adopted ongoing feuds Stitt has engaged in with lots of the 39 federally acknowledged Native American tribes, one other concern Hofmeister hits laborious on the marketing campaign path.
Independent Ervin Yen, an Oklahoma City anesthesiologist and former Republican state senator, and Libertarian Natalie Bruno of Edmond additionally had been working on Tuesday’s gubernatorial poll.
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