Democrats vie for nomination in congressional battleground districts

“I've had a lot of people ask me who's running for Congress on the Democratic side,” said former state Sen. Kenneth Corn, the Oklahoma Democratic Party's chairman of the 2nd congressional district.

“The Republicans seem to be getting most of the attention.”

That likely will change in the next several days, as voters start to focus on their choices in the June 26 primary.

Rep. Dan Boren, of Muskogee, the only Democrat in Oklahoma's seven-person congressional delegation, is retiring. The seat is expected to be a target for the national Republican Party since the district went overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008, despite the fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republican by more than two to one.

For Democrats, the June 26 contest is among Wayne Herriman, a seed company owner from Muskogee; Rob Wallace, a former district attorney and federal prosecutor from Fort Gibson; and Earl E. Everett, a retired schoolteacher from Fort Gibson.

Everett, who is 78, is not waging an extensive campaign and said he decided to file for the seat mainly to register his displeasure with former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson's endorsement of Wallace.

Corn, of Tishomingo, predicts that Everett will get up to 4 percent of the vote and said he is hoping that won't be enough to force a runoff between Herriman and Wallace; should neither get just more than 50 percent of the vote, the two will have to use valuable resources for a runoff that could otherwise be saved for what will be a contentious and competitive general election.

Conservative Democrats

For the most part, Herriman, 59, and Wallace, 48, differed little in recent interviews on the major issues in Washington. Both spoke as conservative Democrats who didn't embrace their national party's stances on health care reform and tax hikes but vowed to protect Medicare and Social Security.

Boren said his polling of Democrats in the district — which stretches from Rogers County near Tulsa to the southeastern part of the state referred to as Little Dixie — shows 90 percent identify themselves as moderates or conservatives.