A Crude Ad About a Banana — And a Primary That Could Predict the GOP’s Future

In early October, an unusual ad began airing on television in Oklahoma. It opened with Charles McCall, a former speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and current candidate for governor, wielding a butcher knife over a banana in a kitchen. Looking into the camera, McCall said, “Let me be perfectly clear: Cutting this banana” — dramatic chop — “does not make it an orange.” The ad went on to tout McCall’s opposition to transgender rights, then concluded with McCall looking into the camera again. “I have a simple message for any lunatic pushing sex change for kids,” he said. Another chop. “You first.”

If you wanted a 30-second summary of McCall’s strategy in the upcoming GOP gubernatorial primary, this ad was it: a maximal serving of culture-war politics. More recently, he produced an ad vowing to stand with President Donald Trump to “crush the threat of radical Islam” and accused one of his opponents of letting “Radical Muslims infiltrate the OK State Capitol.”

When I interviewed McCall in late January, I asked him about the banana ad. A law enacted in 2023, when McCall was House speaker, expressly prohibits gender-transition procedures for minors. Was there an effort underway to roll back the bill? Did the state need to pass an even more stringent prohibition? “There are a lot of people in the state of Oklahoma that are concerned about those value issues, and they want to know where you stand on them,” he responded. “It’s not the only thing we are talking about and have been talking about, but that’s important to the Republican electorate.”

Polling suggests he isn’t exactly wrong. In a January survey conducted by Oklahoma pollster Cole Hargrave Snodgrass and Associates, 53% of likely Republican primary voters said cultural issues such as banning Sharia law and transgender surgeries for youth would be vital when deciding which candidate to support. Just 39% said those topics were less important than day-to-day government functions, namely public education, tax policy and infrastructure.

And yet the favorite in the Republican primary, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, is taking a different tack. To be clear, Drummond is no centrist. He has frequently voiced support for the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and criticized the current governor, Kevin Stitt — who is barred by term limits from running again — for collaborating with the Biden administration to resettle hundreds of Afghan refugees in 2021.

But Drummond also believes McCall has overestimated voters’ appetite for culture-war issues. The electorate, he maintains, is more interested in quality-of-life questions, like improving the state’s abysmal public education rankings and reining in soaring homeowner-insurance rates. “Right now in Oklahoma, you cannot wake up a male yesterday and wake up a female today and compete in sports,” Drummond told me in February. “It’s not permissible today to chop your banana in two as a minor. Now, if you want to have gender-altering surgery as an 18-year-old, knock yourself out. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but these issues that one candidate is promoting are really solved issues.”

Drummond struck a similar tone during a Feb. 19 candidate forum at Randall University, a private Christian college outside Oklahoma City. The moderator, reading audience-submitted questions, asked the candidates what they would do to stop circumventions of the state’s total abortion ban. While other candidates vowed to crack down on abortion medication sent via mail from out-of-state physicians, Drummond said the state should simply enforce existing laws. “We in Oklahoma do a great job of protecting the unborn,” he said. “We issue guidance to doctors that is bright-lined: Abortion is illegal in the state of Oklahoma. We cherish life. Now, we need to cherish the 2- and 3-year-olds, the kids in grade school, and we need to get them workforce ready.”

Drummond’s comparative pragmatism hasn’t just opened a lane for McCall. Two other Republican candidates — Chip Keating, a former secretary of public safety and the son of the former Gov. Frank Keating, and Mike Mazzei, a former state senator — have followed McCall’s lead and leaned into culture-war issues. Keating has bickered with McCall on social media over who is more hostile to Islam and youth transgender surgeries. (One post, captioned “Minneapolis McCall,” showed an edited image of McCall sitting with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.) And Mazzei has aired advertisements touting his no-exceptions stance on abortion.

Perhaps as a result, what initially appeared to be a two-man race between McCall and Drummond now looks more complicated. McCall, Keating and Mazzei, according to a recent Cole Hargrave Snodgrass and Associates poll, are all in a virtual tie for second place. In a race that will go to a runoff if no one wins a majority, the three culture-war-heavy candidates, combined, have about 40% of the vote, compared to Drummond’s 36%.

And so, at a moment when no one knows exactly what the post-Trump Republican Party will look like nationwide in 2028 and beyond, the June 16 primary in this reddest of states has become an under-the-radar test case. Is it possible, as Drummond seems to be betting, that Republicans’ appetite for hardcore culture-war politics has finally begun to wane? Are practical issues like education, infrastructure and taxes about to return to the forefront of conservative politics? Or are McCall and his fellow social conservatives correct that waging an all-out culture war remains the surest path to the hearts of the Republican base?

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Drummond is known in Oklahoma as a no-nonsense operator. He arrived for our February interview at Oklahoma Watch’s office ahead of schedule, ready to skip the customary small talk and dive straight into the issues. “I think what you have with me is a very serious candidate whose objective is Oklahoma first, putting Oklahomans before politics,” he said minutes after arriving. “No platitudes, no rhetoric, just performance. We’ve seen that as the attorney general. I made promises. I delivered on those promises.”

Drummond, now 62, comes from a family that built generational wealth in far northeastern Oklahoma. His great-grandfather, a Scottish immigrant, started a large-scale cattle ranching operation near the town of Pawhuska and helped found the Hominy Trading Company, which produced blankets and other items popular with members of the Osage Nation. (Some historians have speculated that there’s a connection between the Drummond family and the Osage “Reign of Terror” depicted in the 2023 Martin Scorsese film “Killers of the Flower Moon.”)

After graduating from Oklahoma State University in 1985, Drummond served eight years in the U.S. Air Force, including a tour as a fighter pilot in Operation Desert Storm. He subsequently worked for then-U.S. Sen. David Boren, a Democrat from Oklahoma, and earned a law degree from Georgetown University. He later started a law firm and became a principal owner of Blue Sky Bank. He has consistently identified as a Republican but has occasionally donated to Democrats — for instance, contributing $500 in 2017 to state Rep. John Waldron, who would go on to become chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party.

As attorney general, Gentner Drummond built a reputation for independence. Sue Ogrocki/AP

In 2018, he lost the Republican runoff for attorney general by a mere 271 votes to Mike Hunter, who ultimately resigned from the position in 2021 over a personal scandal. The next year, Drummond ran again. Despite facing accusations of being a Never Trumper and a liberal in disguise, he defeated John O’Connor — who had been appointed by Stitt to fill the vacant job — by just over 6,000 votes in the Republican primary. He won in a landslide in November.

As attorney general, Drummond built a reputation for independence. Expressing concern that prosecutors had acted improperly, he commissioned an outside review of the case of Richard Glossip, a convicted murderer whose death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2025 following numerous near-executions. He argued against the state’s authorization of a Catholic virtual charter school, maintaining that a taxpayer-funded religious school would violate the Oklahoma Constitution. And despite opposition from Stitt, a longtime political foe, Drummond has asserted the right of Native Americans to hunt and fish on tribal lands without a license.

Drummond, predictably, shifted to the right as he prepared to run for governor. In December 2024, he dismissed felony assault and battery charges against an Oklahoma City police officer accused of improperly slamming a 71-year-old man with cancer to the ground during a traffic stop. The man died less than one year later, and an attorney representing his family in a federal civil rights complaint said the injuries worsened preexisting conditions and hastened his death. Drummond argued that the officer didn’t exhibit criminal intent and therefore should not face charges. Less than a month after dropping the charges, Drummond was endorsed by the Oklahoma State Fraternal Order of Police.

He has, in addition, angered Glossip’s supporters, who feel he succumbed to external pressure and effectively backtracked on his earlier efforts. In June 2025, Drummond announced the state would once again file a first-degree-murder charge against Glossip, though without capital punishment as a possibility.

Yet even with these moves, Drummond remains far and away the most pragmatic candidate in the race. He says his top priority as governor would be improving public education. Number two is steadying the state’s mental health care system, which has faced a severe budget shortfall and financial mismanagement in recent years. Drummond attributes the issues to poor planning and ineffective oversight within the executive branch.

Drummond has also consistently aligned himself with the state’s tribal nations. “I’ve met with every tribal leader in the state of Oklahoma, and they are holding their breath for the next 11 months to have a governor that understands and respects them,” Drummond told me. “What you will find in my administration shortly after my inauguration are intergovernmental compacts through which the tribes permit the state of Oklahoma to prosecute in the name of the tribe and adjudicate in the name of the tribe and incarcerate in the name of the tribe. They just need a partner in the executive branch that will reach out a hand of fellowship and work with Oklahomans.”

McCall — deeply conservative, religious, ready to battle on hot-button issues — is arguably more in keeping with the combative GOP of the Trump era. His roots are in Atoka, a small town of 3,000 residents in southeastern Oklahoma, about halfway between Dallas and Tulsa. It’s perhaps best known as a convenient stopping point for motorists traveling along U.S. Route 75, with dozens of fast-food options and gas stations competing for business. Reba’s Place, a restaurant founded by country music star Reba McEntire, has helped spur tourism to Atoka since 2023.

Now 55, McCall rose to local prominence leading a bank, then steadily climbed the political ladder, starting with the Atoka City Council in 2004. Before running for the state House in 2012, he changed his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican. Today, he presents as a deliberate talker and intentional relationship builder. While at the Oklahoma Watch office for our interview, he made a point to shake the hand of every staff member.

As House speaker, McCall had his fair share of squabbles with Stitt, but unlike Drummond, he thinks the state has fared generally well over the past eight years, and he would welcome an endorsement from the governor. “We were able to get a lot of good things accomplished,” McCall told me. “We got great investments into education and infrastructure in the state. We were able to lower taxation on people and businesses in the state, and I think that’s why Oklahoma is the 10th-fastest-growing state in the nation.”

Drummond, for his part, describes the state’s economic turnaround under Stitt — from a budget shortfall to billions of dollars in the bank — as correlation, not causation. “By the time he took office, the economy of the United States and consequently Oklahoma was on a strong high, and it continued,” Drummond told me. “As you watch economic data points, notwithstanding the tariffs and other headwinds facing us, we’re still doing OK. But that day, that crescendo, is probably ready to crest. We’re going into a period of economic stagnation or decline for a period of four to five years. Had Governor Stitt been in that period, we’d have a budget failure.”

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Looming over this race is the saga of Ryan Walters, the most prominent culture warrior to emerge from Oklahoma in recent years. A former Oklahoma Teacher of the Year finalist from the small southeastern city of McAlester, Walters was appointed the state’s secretary of education by Stitt in 2020. Two years later, he emerged from a hotly contested Republican primary as the nominee for a different position: state superintendent of schools.

Vowing to crack down on “critical race theory” and supposed left-wing indoctrination of students, he turned his office into a culture-war battleground — and several elected officials who had endorsed him, Stitt among them, soon had buyer’s remorse. During his nearly three years as state superintendent, he faced numerous scandals and allegations of using state funds to prop up his national profile as a conservative culture warrior.

Walters stepped down in October to become CEO of a conservative education nonprofit. His successor has already rescinded several of his initiatives, including the allocation of millions of dollars to purchase Trump-branded Bibles for every classroom. (I reached out to Walters for this article, but he did not respond.)

Among his other legacies, Walters was unable to reverse the slide of Oklahoma’s persistently low public education rankings. As recently as 2011, Education Week ranked Oklahoma’s schools 17th in the nation. That number nosedived throughout the 2010s as the state reeled from budget shortfalls caused by volatility in the oil and gas industry. In 2018, public schools were shut down for weeks in March and April as teachers marched on the state Capitol to protest a lack of classroom funding and stagnant wages. The plummeting rankings have spurred panic in the state’s business community, which fears that poor public schools will scare off businesses and cause economic opportunities to bypass the Sooner State and head south to Dallas or Houston.

Drummond, who entered elected office at the same time as Walters in January 2023, was a frequent critic, lambasting Walters for failing to respond to open-records requests and criticizing his agency’s delay in releasing funds earmarked for school safety initiatives. Now, he promises a level-headed approach to education. Like numerous other officials, Drummond has lauded Mississippi’s progress — which has recently garnered considerable national attention — in improving childhood literacy rates. He thinks Oklahoma could replicate those results without a significant funding increase and he sees improved child-care access beginning at 2 years old as a key factor. “It’s a marathon,” he told me. “If you go back and watch Mississippi, over the last eight years, you had a governor who was all in. You can have a great superintendent of public education, you can have a well-intentioned speaker of the House and Senate president, but the states whose governor is all in can move” education rankings.

McCall was more sympathetic to Walters. While speaker, he refused calls from some Republican lawmakers, including the chair of the House Committee on Common Education, to initiate impeachment proceedings against him. He eventually set the bar at two-thirds support among House Republicans, which never came to pass. Today, McCall maintains that his hands were tied on impeachment because there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Former Oklahoma House speaker Charles McCall is deeply conservative, religious and ready to battle on hot-button issues. Sue Ogrocki/AP

Going forward, Stitt has proposed letting the governor appoint the state superintendent. Drummond opposes that step, saying it would give the executive branch too much power. “He just doesn’t understand the government in Oklahoma,” Drummond told me. “Our original population was a populist body. They don’t trust concentration of power. … The governor is complicit in creating Ryan Walters, now sees the error of that and would like to right it.”

McCall, by contrast, says he would welcome such a step. “I will be asking the Legislature to grant more authority for direct oversight of the executive branch of government,” he told me. “I want to be able to make changes quicker that benefit the people of this state.”

Meanwhile, Walters’ culture-warrior legacy continues to loom not just over education policy but over local political strategy. Richard Johnson, a longtime political science professor at Oklahoma City University, told me that candidates are walking a fine line vis-à-vis Walters: seeking to appeal to his far-right base without alienating those critical of his performance as state superintendent. “It’s kind of hard to be complimentary of him,” Johnson said. “There are things you can say to appeal to his type of voters without invoking his name. That’s probably what you’d want to do.”

Pat McFerron, a longtime lobbyist and pollster for Cole Hargrave Snodgrass and Associates, told me he thinks Walters has created a model for how to run for statewide office in Oklahoma. “Ryan Walters has poured gasoline on the [idea] that you can be successful being like this,” he said. “‘You know, maybe if we do things just a little bit differently, we can too.’ I think we’re headed toward more Ryan Walters, not fewer.”

***

Plenty of other issues, ranging from culture-war-adjacent to eminently practical, are also getting attention in the race. Keating, who often references his experience as an Oklahoma state trooper in the mid-2000s, has taken a tough line on immigration. At the Randall University forum, he decried “weak” municipalities that are not fully cooperating with the federal government on immigration enforcement — some citing a lack of resources, others citing a fear that immigrant communities could lose trust in local law enforcement.

When I asked him in an interview if he empathized with law enforcement leaders who fear losing community trust, Keating didn’t back down. “That’s a convenient, kind of cop-out answer,” he said. “The reality is, what they’re asking them to do is enforce the law. Police departments and law enforcement don’t get to pick and choose what laws they enforce. They shouldn’t. It’s become weaponized and political, but these folks are here illegally. We are a nation of laws, so that’s a cop-out answer. There’s always a way to do it in a way where we don’t violate trust.”

Keating has tried to pitch himself as a candidate who cares fiercely about culture-war issues but won’t give short shrift to education and the economy. “We’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum,” he told me. “We don’t do those things” — cultural liberalism — “and we will always make sure we don’t do those things and protect our way of life. What I hear from Oklahomans is they want to fix education. The economy is important. They want to see more money back in their pockets on taxes.”

A former secretary of public safety and onetime state trooper, Chip Keating (left) has taken a tough line on immigration. Sue Ogrocki/AP

Mazzei, who chaired the Oklahoma Senate Finance Committee in the late 2000s and 2010s, gained momentum initially in the gubernatorial primary by vowing to eliminate state property taxes for seniors. More recently, however, he has pivoted to culture-war rhetoric. At the Randall forum, he warned attendees of “watered-down, milquetoast, weak RINOs” masquerading as conservatives.

Three additional candidates — former state Sen. Jake Merrick, former City Manager Leisa Mitchell Haynes and mechanical contractor Kenneth Sturgell — are also vying for the nomination. Merrick is a self-described abortion abolitionist. At the Randall forum, Sturgell led a prayer thanking God for President Trump. Haynes said God had told her in third grade she would be elected governor, and an angel reappeared in 2023 to tell her it was time to launch her campaign. All three candidates have low polling numbers, but in the event of a runoff, their supporters — probably, on balance, part of the electorate’s pro-culture-war camp — could influence the outcome.

***

Nine days after the Randall University forum, the Oklahoma Republican Party held a forum at an event center two miles north of the state Capitol. All the candidates attended except McCall, who said he had a previous obligation to officiate a wedding. Supporters of the candidates held campaign signs and offered free T-shirts, hoping to make a mark on an influential, high-propensity-to-vote audience.

The culture wars were once again on the agenda. One audience-submitted question focused on Sharia, a favorite topic of Oklahoma conservatives. Back in 2010, more than 70% of Oklahoma voters approved a ban on state courts using Sharia or any other international law. The ballot initiative was spearheaded by the Republican majority in the state Legislature, which hoped the question would spur high conservative turnout in that year’s midterm elections. The measure was struck down by a federal appeals court, which ruled that it unfairly targeted one religion and that the threat of Sharia was largely a myth, but Oklahoma politicians continue to revisit the issue. Numerous bills to ban “Sharia” are currently pending in the state Legislature.

Several candidates expressed their support for the legislation. Mazzei promised “on my first day in office” to “designate the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization and transnational criminal organization.” Keating and McCall, in public statements and interviews with me, have also said they intend to declare the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations terrorist organizations.

Not surprisingly, Drummond took a different, less inflammatory tone. “If an organization promotes terrorism or breaks the law, under my regime as attorney general, it has been investigated,” he said at the forum. “We have launched numerous investigations to hold accountable those who come into our state. We are also all immigrants. Our people came from Spain, Germany, England, Africa, Asia. What did we do when we came to America? We integrated. We joined a civic organization, a church. We joined our public schools. We integrated. Spoke our language and became Americans. To any immigrant that wants to come to the United States, to come to Oklahoma and integrate into our state, I welcome you with open arms. If you come here for the purpose of isolation, through which you will subsequently radicalize your youth, I stand in your way.”

Former state senator Mike Mazzei has vowed to bring professors before the state Legislature to testify on how they’re eliminating DEI initiatives on their campuses. Sue Ogrocki/AP

Beyond Sharia, Keating spoke about how the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which took place when his father was governor, had inspired him to enter public service — but he quickly pivoted to an attack on liberals. “Those were very different times,” he said. “Not polarizing times in the environment we live in today, where you’ve got the radical left that thinks political violence is acceptable.”

Mazzei, after fielding a question from the moderator about religious freedom in education, vowed to bring professors before the state Legislature to testify on how they’re eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on their campuses. “There will be no true religious freedom on our college campuses until we root out DEI, radical-left wokeism,” he said.

Drummond, in his closing remarks, again sounded a less ideological note. “Don’t judge me by words, judge me by my actions,” he said. “When I secured the nomination for attorney general, I sat down to develop a policy for the office. I made you four promises. We drive out illegal cartels and syndicated crime organizations. We would partner with the tribes to build a stronger criminal justice system. We could snuff out fraud and those who wish to misuse our tax dollars. We would maintain openness and transparency in state government. Four promises made, four promises kept.”

***

Oklahoma may be among the most conservative states in the country, but its politics sometimes defy stereotype. Over the past decade, voters have, via referendum, enacted criminal justice reform, legalized medical marijuana and expanded Medicaid — all despite opposition from elected Republicans. A ballot question that would incrementally raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour is set to go before voters in June.

Drummond is seeking to appeal to that streak of independence. He is not someone who puts “party first, or whatever important talking point politicos and lobbyists want. You’ve seen me take on pharmacy benefit managers. Those guys are robber barons,” he told me. “That’s not Democratic or Republican.”

McCall, meanwhile, does not want to be known only as a culture warrior. “When I’m out talking to people across the state, I’m not just talking about protecting women in sports or the accomplishment of banning gender-reassignment surgeries for minors or banning critical race theory and mask mandates and passing the toughest immigration laws in the country,” he said. “We’re talking about the economy; we’re talking about education; we’re talking about ad valorem taxes. At the end of the day, what I want to know is, what do the families talk about at night? What is it that concerns people and what are they struggling with?”

Yet McFerron, the Oklahoma City-based pollster, anticipates culture-war issues will continue to dominate the campaign. He blames the state’s closed primary system — only registered Republicans can vote in the party’s primary — and likely low voter turnout. (Less than one-third of eligible Republican voters participated in the August 2018 runoff election, the last time there was a competitive governor’s race.) “Closed primaries are one thing if November elections are competitive, but with a closed primary in a one-party state, you’re giving a whole lot of power to a handful of people,” McFerron told me. “That handful of people tend to be more motivated by fear than they are by love. So you get campaigns that focus on culture wars, not on solving problems.”

Oklahoma’s closed primary system is no doubt a factor in how candidates campaign and position themselves. But that would only make a Drummond victory all the more noteworthy, especially if he ends up facing a united pro-culture-war front in a possible runoff. “I think the real dynamic here is whether the anti-Drummond forces consolidate around one of the candidates,” Brett Sharp, a political science professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, told me. “That would tighten up the race a lot and might even overcome the Drummond lead.”

If Drummond prevails anyway, it might suggest that Republicans’ culture-war fever has finally broken. And if not? Then McCall — or Keating or Mazzei or whoever emerges from the primary — will have provided a powerful clue about the GOP base’s current frame of mind, here and across the country: Nuance is still out. Bananas and butcher knives are in.

Keaton Ross is a reporter at Oklahoma Watch.