A renewed round of leadership elections at the Democratic National Committee is underway after the elections of Vice Chairs David Hogg and Malcolm Kenyatta were vacated, and Oklahoma’s DNC representative Kalyn Free is the reason why.
Oklahoma rarely gets a spot on the national Democratic stage — given its bright red electorate and all-Republican congressional delegation. But Free wants to change that.
“There’s rural America in every state in the country, and until we start listening to the voters in rural America, we are never going to earn back their trust and their votes,” she told NOTUS in an interview. “The voice that I bring to the DNC is a voice that is not currently being heard, and that is a voice from rural America and a voice from Indian Country.”
“We didn’t lose Pennsylvania because we lost Philadelphia,” Free added. “We lost Pennsylvania because we lost rural Pennsylvania.”
Free filed a challenge in February to the vice chair elections after she realized that the men had access to double the votes of the women and all-gender candidates. The male candidates were on both the male and all-gender ballots when the race was supposed to be segregated by gender, making it “mathematically impossible” for a woman to win, she said.
Free called it a “fundamental breach” of the candidates’ rights to a fair election, as well as the DNC members’ rights to choose their new leaders. She is running again for a vice chair spot at the DNC leadership table.
After hearings and votes within the DNC, the February election results were thrown out. On June 11, Hogg — who faced backlash for his $20 million plan to primary Democratic incumbents — announced he wouldn’t run again. Kenyatta ran again, ultimately winning the male co-chair position on Saturday. Free and two other candidates have a shot to win the second seat on Tuesday.
“This is long before David Hogg said anything about primarying Democrats, and this had nothing to do with David Hogg or Malcolm Kenyatta,” Free said. “I’ve been fighting for justice and what’s right my whole professional career, and it’s about election integrity. We’re the Democratic party, and how can we stand up to talk about free and fair elections if we don’t keep our own counsel in order?”
Free, a lawyer and Choctaw Nation citizen, said she felt inspired to jump into the DNC race after working for Tulsa’s Democratic Mayor Monroe Nichols’ campaign. She’s worked on hundreds of other campaigns, she said, and ran an organization called INDN’s List to help Native Americans get elected across the country. If elected to DNC leadership, a mission of hers is to tap into the rural vote. Most other DNC leadership members are from blue or battleground states, many hailing from big cities.
The DNC doesn’t give “a flying flip about Oklahoma,” Free said, pointing to Nichols’ election as Tulsa’s first-ever Black mayor, over a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre.
It’s these forgotten races and constituencies that Free said she wants to prioritize if she’s elected. She wants to build a “real organizing effort” in Indian Country for Democrats, a “permanent” fixture on reservations rather than a parachuting operation before elections.
Her election would be “a message to Indian Country that we are not being taken for granted, that we are not invisible and that we have a seat at the table,” she said.
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Em Luetkemeyer is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.