On Friday, state Sen. Joseph Silk announced that he’d challenge Rep. Markwayne Mullin in the June GOP primary for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District, a safely red seat in the eastern part of the state.
Silk has a notoriously bad relationship with his party’s legislative leaders, and he claims he got booted from his committee vice chairmanship this spring after he promoted an unsuccessful bill to classify abortion as murder. Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat said in response that he’d demoted Silk not for this legislation but because of his behavior. Treat accused Silk of trying to raise money to pay for billboards for an anti-abortion group that criticized another GOP senator, and he also argued that Silk and his allies had hurled unjustified attacks at the Senate Republican Caucus over social media.
Silk in turn said that he had no control over what his supporters did. He also told several of his colleagues in a letter, “I have served in the U.S. Coast Guard under many different commands, held many different occupations, run a business and served in the State Senate under three different leadership teams and have never seen a more authoritarian leadership than we currently have.”
Silk emphasized his anti-establishment reputation as he argued that Mullin has spent his four terms in D.C. doing the bidding of congressional bosses rather than pushing through necessary conservative change. Silk did not attack Mullin, though, for abandoning his 2012 pledge to only serve three terms. However, that issue could cause the congressman some trouble.
In 2016, Mullin began hinting that he wanted to stay in Congress a whole lot longer, which drew an angry rebuke from former Sen. Tom Coburn. Coburn, a term-limits true believer who represented this area in the 1990s, ended up backing Army veteran Jarrin Jackson in the primary; Mullin won, but by an unimpressive 62-38 margin. Mullin sought that once-forbidden fourth term in 2018 and he once again Jackson as well as a few other candidates. This time, Mullin took just 54% of the vote, while Jackson was a distant second at 25%.
Mullin’s team said Friday that he would seek re-election again. Oklahoma requires a runoff for primary contests where no one takes a majority of the vote, so the incumbent could be in real trouble if he does just a little worse than he did last cycle.
Want more great elections coverage like this? Sign up for our free daily newsletter, the Morning Digest.