Oklahoma elections: Drew Edmondson to leave politics

"I have no interest in running for anything else," said Edmondson, who also served as a legislator and three terms as a district attorney from Muskogee County.

Edmondson, ahead in polls the past year and picked in many to easily win Tuesday's Democratic gubernatorial election, lost by slightly more than one-half percent to Lt. Gov. Jari Askins. Askins won 50.3 percent of the votes while Edmondson received 49.7 percent.

The margin of defeat had nothing to do with his decision. He's not bitter about it; he came out strongly endorsing Askins and has pledged to work to help her win the November general election.

Edmondson, 63, said he decided when he started his gubernatorial campaign last year that this would be the last political office he would seek. If he had won the election, he likely would have sought a second four-year term.

A poll released as recently as Friday showed Edmondson with a 16-point lead over Askins.

His own polling, he said, showed him with a decent lead last week and increasing.

"The polls that we'd seen ... all of those showed us with a substantial lead," he said. "It was turnout. If everybody had gone to vote, we might have won it by 16 points. But not everybody did.

"There are no excuses in this game. If you don't get your voters out, then you lose."

An Edmondson victory depended on him winning big in Tulsa and northeastern Oklahoma and in much of eastern Oklahoma.

Edmondson won many of those counties, where many residents supported his filing a federal lawsuit against several Arkansas poultry companies claiming they had polluted northeastern Oklahoma's watershed, but not by large margins. The exception was Tulsa County and his home county of Muskogee County, where he won each with about 62 percent of the vote.