Tulsa World: Nonpartisan Tulsa election may be decided by partisan voters
By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
The math is simple.
To win Tuesday's mayoral election, Kathy Taylor has to get some Republican votes or get Republican voters to stay home.
About 46,000 more Republicans than Democrats are registered to vote Tuesday, and even though the election is supposed to be nonpartisan, it is no secret that Taylor is the Democrat on the ballot.
Incumbent Dewey Bartlett is the Republican.
And, according to an Oklahoma Poll conducted last week, Bartlett is doing better with Democrats than Taylor is with Republicans. If that trend holds up, only a greatly superior voter turnout effort by the Taylor campaign can return her to the office she held from 2006 to 2009.
Overall, Bartlett leads Taylor 49 percent to 38 percent, as reported in Sunday's Tulsa World. Drilling down deeper, Bartlett is getting 77 percent of the Republican vote and 21 percent of the Democrat vote, compared to 66 percent of the Democrats and just 11 percent of Republicans for Taylor.
Independents, who make up about one-eighth of the city's eligible voters, favor Bartlett over Taylor, 44 percent to 41 percent.
The brightest spot for Taylor in the poll conducted Nov. 1-5 is that it shows Bartlett short of a majority. But Taylor's prospects of picking up enough of the undecided votes to make a difference are fairly dim.
Ideologically and by party affiliation, the undecideds are almost evenly divided between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.
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About the Oklahoma Poll
The poll of 401 likely voters was conducted November 1-5 by SoonerPoll.com, using a random digit-dialing technique that included cellphone and landline telephone numbers. Results were weighted by gender, age and party. The poll was sponsored by the Tulsa World. The margin of error is ±4.9 percentage points.
This poll conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls. A complete description of the methodology can be found here.
