Democrats on a roll after third consecutive special election victory

TULSA — In the solidly Republican Oklahoma House District 46, a Democrat walked away with a resounding victory Tuesday in a special election.

It’s the third special election victory in a row for Democrats, and this time the seat wasn’t vacated because of scandal; Scott Martin resigned the seat to take a job with the Norman Chamber of Commerce.

But despite the fact that registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in that Norman House District by some 3,000 voters, Jacob Rosecrants walloped the GOP candidate, Darin Chambers, 3,176 votes to 2,081.

That's a 20-point margin of victory.

Anna Langthorn is the new Chairman of the Oklahoma State Democratic Party.

She told KRMG the string of recent victories can now be safely called a trend.

“Three means that it’s not a fluke,” she told KRMG Wednesday. “I think that’s what we’ve all decided, is that three in a row means that there is something happening, that things are trending well. And I always try to take credit for actually four. We didn’t win the first one, but it was a race in Seminole that was arguably a lot closer than it should have been. It was 56 votes, which that to me said ‘oh, if we can lose in Seminole by 56 votes, that I think that we can probably win in Norman.’ And I think that we’re going to continue to see that in the Oklahoma City metro area where we have one more special election and then in the Tulsa metro area, where we have two.”

She said she thinks there’s been a combination of Republican mistakes and hard work on the part of Democrats that have resulted in several upsets.

"Republicans are certainly not doing themselves any favors. We continue to see failures in leadership, whether it's actual scandals or whether it's just crises," she said. "We're going to have this special session because of the unconstitutional budget that was passed that we all said was unconstitutional. I think that no one's excited about that, and it's really starting to affect people's lives in a serious way. And Democrats are not only offering an alternative solution, but real solutions."

Voters, she said, are expressing their unhappiness at the voting booth.

“I think that Oklahoma voters are tired of imbalanced leadership, that it’s clear that Republicans have had too much power for too long, and it’s affecting Oklahomans’ lives.”