Recent polls showing President Joe Biden‘s approval ratings to be slumping have many members of his own party keeping their distance. Including the Democratic Senate nominee running to replace Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK).
Former Rep. Kendra Horn (D-OK), in an interview with the Washington Examiner, declined to explicitly say whether the president should seek office in 2024. Horn is a centrist Democrat who won one of the biggest upsets of the 2018 election cycle by beating a Republican incumbent in an Oklahoma City-based House seat, before losing in 2020 to Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK).
Horn spoke to the Washington Examiner about a need for “more diverse leaders from different parts of the country” when asked whether Biden should run for a second term.
“We need people with differing opinions from different parts of the country who are moderates and thoughtful,” Horn said. The former congresswoman said the president has “done some things right.” That despite having “many places that I disagree with Biden.” Her comments come as the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate for Biden’s approval now stands at just 37.1% — a low point for his year-and-a-half as president.
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Horn avoided a primary election by running as the lone Democratic candidate for the soon-to-be-open Senate seat after Inhofe, 87, announced he would leave the Senate in January 2023, with four years left on his six-year term. Horn faces an uphill battle in the deep-red Sooner State, where in 2020 former President Donald Trump won every county. An Aug. 23 runoff between GOP Rep. Markwayne Mullin and former state House Speaker T.W. Shannon will determine her opponent for the November election.
While Horn is fixated on defeating the eventual GOP nominee in her bid for Senate, her lukewarm response about the president’s 2024 prospects comes at a time where approximately 41% of Democrats would prefer another candidate as the party’s standard-bearer two years from now, well above the 35% who want a second Biden term, a Yahoo News/YouGov survey found on July 13.
And Horn is no stranger to open disagreements with the Biden administration. She won Oklahoma’s 5th District seat — since made more Republican in the redistricting process — as an ardent defender of the state’s oil and gas industry. Even as her party is demanding reducing fossil fuel use to combat climate change.
“Here’s one of the places Biden and I disagree,” Horn wrote in an October 2020 social media post. “We must stand up for our oil and gas industry. We need an all-of-the-above energy approach that’s consumer-friendly, values energy independence, and protects OK jobs. I’ll keep fighting for that in Congress.”
Although Horn walks a fine line to appeal to voters in a state which ranks as the fifth-largest producer of marketed natural gas and the sixth-largest producer of crude oil, she stands firm with the administration on cornerstone issues such as her vehement opposition to the June 24 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision allowed states, including Oklahoma, to pass laws severely limiting and restricting abortion access.
“Markwayne supports this complete ban on abortion not only here but wants to put it in place federally,” Horn said about Mullin, her former House colleague.
“I want to protect access to healthcare, reproductive health, and let women make their own health and reproductive decisions as they were under Roe,” Horn said. Horn added that she is in favor of “reasonable access so that a woman and her doctor can make those decisions.”
Horn also hit Mullin for his recent involvement in television ads promoting his family plumbing company despite a 2013 investigation into him by the House Ethics Committee for earning more than $600,000 from his business. “That’s expressly prohibited,” the Democratic nominee said.
The committee resorted in 2018 to calling on Mullin to return $40,000 to his family business, Mullin West, after the review found funds were paid out to him in a way that was out of compliance with House rules and the committee’s advisement.
Mullin, at the time, said, “the rules have changed” after the committee’s order, and the guidance of the report “proves that you can no longer be a citizen legislator.”
Horn’s campaign believes her prospects for winning Inhofe’s seat are greatly increased when pitted against Republicans allegedly “involved in scandals,” according to internal polling data from May 5 by Change Research seen by the Washington Examiner.
The poll surveyed 863 registered voters and was published before the GOP primary. It went on to say that “a majority of voters would vote against a candidate for Senate who … dismissed the fact that their constituents pay their salary, and wrote laws to ban and criminalize abortion without exception in Oklahoma.” The results from the campaign-sponsored poll showed Horn tied at 38% between a GOP nominee, with 24% of voters undecided.
As for Biden’s low approval ratings, the White House is eagerly pointing to poll numbers showing he still has massive support among Democrats. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on July 11 that 92% of Democrats would still support Biden in a rematch against Trump, according to the New York Times/Siena College poll. The president held a slender 3-point lead over his predecessor, though he was stuck in the mid-40s.
And for Horn, her priorities hinge on defeating her Republican opponent and defending against what she calls a “rise in extremism.”
“I see that as incredibly dangerous, and I mean, extremists on the right and on the left,” Horn said in the interview. She further decried a so-called lack of focus on “the real issues that are facing our communities.”
“We’re not taking steps forward to solve the problems. So that’s an approach that I take everything,” she added.
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Oklahoma’s deep-red status among voters led to Inhofe’s sweeping victory in 2020 over his Democratic challenger, Abby Broyles, who gained just 33% of the vote.
Still, the previous presidential election was indicative of a demographic shift in Oklahoma County, which comprises 20% of the state’s population. Trump beat then-candidate Biden by a narrow 49.21% to 48.08% margin. That marked a significant shift to the left in Oklahoma County from 2016, when Trump won 51.58% to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 41.18%.
