An unexpected glimmer of hope in a dark political moment
With some of the nation’s most draconian laws prohibiting abortion rights, gender-affirming care for minors, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, Oklahoma would seem to be one of the last places to push back against an extremist right-wing politician.
But in a surprising move, voters in Enid, a city about 90 miles north of Oklahoma City, booted out a member of its city council after it was revealed that he marched with neoNazis at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and had other ties to white nationalist groups.
Less than a year after his election to a commissioner’s seat, Judd Blevins lost a recall vote on Tuesday in a city that, like most of Oklahoma, is heavily conservative. In a state where Donald Trump won every county in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, it’s a sliver of hope that someone with divisive views closely aligned with those of the former president lost by 20 points.
“We won. Blevins lost. Hate lost,” Connie Vickers told NBC News. A Democrat and
Enid resident, she had the receipts on Blevins’s white nationalist affiliations before he finally acknowledged them at a public forum. That included his former leadership of an Oklahoma chapter of Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group that has since rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement.
At that forum, Blevins tried to defend both his Identity Evropa membership and his participation in the 2017 white nationalist rally where a self-identified white supremacist plowed his car into a group of antiracist counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer.
He claimed his decisions were motivated by a need to bring “attention to the same isting sues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016 — securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on this anti-white hatred that is so common in media entertainment.”
Blevins also said he went to the rally “to protest the removal of statues of American soldiers.” He added, “It’s our history. It’s our heritage. It’s who we are.”
Those “American soldiers,” as Blevins called them, were Confederate traitors who waged a war to tear this country apart in order to preserve and expand slavery.
Cheryl Patterson, a fellow conservative Republican who campaigned on bringing “normalcy” back to Enid, will replace Blevins. Her call for normalcy seemed to echo what Nikki Haley often said during her presidential campaign about why Republicans needed to move on from Trump.
Without reading too much into Blevins’s ouster, it’s noteworthy that the successful recall effort was led by a small group of progressives in a city where Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats. And it happened on the same day that hundreds of thousands of Republicans in four states voted against Trump in their primaries. The former president hasn’t faced a primary opponent since March, when Haley dropped out of the race after gettrounced in South Carolina, her home state, a week earlier.
But in Wisconsin alone, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, lost more than 120,000 Republican votes, most of them to Haley.
Much has been said about the substantial “uncommitted” votes in opposition to President Biden’s pro-Israel stance and funding of Israel’s war against Hamas while atrocities against humanitarian aid workers, journalists, and especially more than 32,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza continue to mount.
It’s a significant challenge Biden will need to navigate to win a second term in the White House.
But what has been happening at the polls also portends peril for Biden’s likely Republican opponent. While handily winning each primary, Trump continues to lose hundreds of thousands of votes to candidates who are no longer in the race. These are protest votes indicating that there remains at least some stalwart Republican resistance to Trump, especially as his rhetoric becomes more dehumanizing and unhinged — such as referring to migrants as “animals” or claiming that this nation will “cease to exist” if he loses to Biden in November.
Blevins did what most Republican aspirants to office believe they must do if they want to be viable candidates — he eliminated any space between himself and Trump. But his solidarity with the former president did not make him immune to the wrath of voters who’d had enough.
No, I don’t expect a mass Republican retreat away from Trump. But in a time of deep political polarization driven by GOP loyalty to the former president, there’s always fragile hope when Republicans turn on their own.