The Oklahoma State Capital

With key data from three Oklahoma counties still awaiting final posting, Oklahoma State Election Board records already point to a significant shift in the state’s primary electorate.

A comparison of Oklahoma’s June 2026 primary election with its closest equivalent election — the June 2018 primary, when Oklahoma last had an open gubernatorial primary — suggests overall primary turnout fell by 29.5 percent

Democratic participation fell even harder. In 2018, Democratic voters accounted for 39 percent of Oklahoma’s primary electorate. In 2026, their share fell to just 28 percent.

That decline matters because primary participation is one of the clearest available measures of partisan energy heading into the general election. And by that measure, Oklahoma Democrats appear far removed from the momentum they enjoyed in 2018, when the party captured Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District for the first time since the 1970s and picked up a handful of metro-area legislative seats.

This year, Democratic participation dropped in 76 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.

The falloff was especially pronounced in southeastern Oklahoma, where the state’s long-running partisan realignment has been most visible. In Coal County — which, in March 2024, became the last Oklahoma county to move into Republican-majority registration — Democratic participation collapsed. Just 261 Democratic voters were credited with voting in 2026, compared with 1,547 in 2018, an 83 percent decline in raw Democratic participation.

Beaver County recorded the lowest Democratic share of primary participation. There, Democrats made up just 5 percent of the primary electorate, down from 13 percent in 2018. Only 42 Democrats voted in the county’s 2026 primary.

The low level of Democratic participation produced a striking result in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. In 48 precincts, Democratic voting was so sparse that the gubernatorial result became effectively unanimous, effectively stripping away voter anonymity in those precincts. Cyndi Munson carried 42 of them, while Connie Johnson carried the other six.

If Democrats are looking for a silver lining, they may find it in Oklahoma County. It was the only one of Oklahoma’s 77 counties where Democratic participation, measured as a share of the total primary electorate, increased. There, the Democratic share of the vote rose by 1.15 percentage points to just over 40 percent — an increase that may have been driven by the competitive 5th Congressional District contest.

The 2018 election was not an ordinary year for Oklahoma Democrats. It was the year of the teacher walkout, State Question 788, intense anti-Trump energy, and Kendra Horn’s upset win in the 5th Congressional District. It was the closest Oklahoma Democrats had seen to a modern blue-wave year.

Eight years later, the contrast is stark. In 2018, Democrats could not fully translate that surge of energy into lasting statewide gains. In 2026, the challenge appears even more fundamental: in most of Oklahoma, they struggled simply to turn out their voters.