Enid, Oklahoma is a Republican city where the GOP enjoys a 4:1 voter registration advantage. This can mean that city commission elections, which are non-partisan, are not given much attention.
Except in January 2023 one person running for Enid city commission was given some extra attention by the local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle:
A candidate for Enid City Commission was accused nearly four years ago by a progressive advocacy group of being a member of a white nationalist organization that has since disbanded.
The candidate, Judson Blevins, said the accusations were part of hit piece by what he called a “leftist outlet.” Blevins is running for the Ward 1 seat on Enid City Commission.
An article written in March 2019 for Right Wing Watch, a research project of People for the American Way, accused Blevins of being the Oklahoma state coordinator for Identity Evropa — identified as a white nationalist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — formed in 2016, renamed to American Identity Movement in 2019 and disbanded in 2020.
Blevins announced his candidacy for the Ward 1 position in November 2022 and officially filed as a candidate in December, but he declined an interview with the News & Eagle regarding the article and his involvement with Identity Evropa.
Local election apathy, the decline of local newspaper readership, and pitiful turnout meant that Blevins won the election by 36 votes.
But political positions carry visibility, and Blevins’ white supremacist past did eventually become and issue, and 2 citizens took action. Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall did the legwork to call a recall election, and on Tuesday Enid voters removed Blevins from office.
“There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this,” Presnall said. “This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”
You have to know what our musical conclusion is going to be, right? I mean Oklahoma? Judson? Yep.