Two newcomers vie for reconfigured House District 66 seat

The district — represented for the past 12 years by term-limited Republican Jadine Nollan, a lifelong Sand Springs resident — will have a new voice in the state House.

And as a result of the recent redistricting process, many new voices await representation in the district, which previously comprised most of Sand Springs and a few small areas outside the city but which now also encompasses Sperry and Skiatook and a substantial swath of the surrounding rural Tulsa and Osage counties.

No two ways about it, there’s a lot of uncertainty. What’s not particularly uncertain is that James Rankin of Sand Springs, the sole Democrat to seek the seat, has a harder road to victory than his opponent, Clay Staires of Skiatook, who survived a four-man GOP primary and a two-candidate runoff to emerge as the Republican nominee.

Despite enjoying good name recognition in Sand Springs, Rankin agrees that his role is as the underdog, and not only because he’s joining the race in earnest near its end.

“I believe that’s true,” he said recently, noting that HD 66 is about 2-to-1 registered Republicans. “It certainly puts Democrats behind the eight ball from the beginning, so you have to work to effectively get your message out.

“I’ve always been a Democrat. I grew up in a Democratic family. My dad was a journeyman plumber,” he said, although, he added, “When I grew up, it was the working man’s party. It was really the party of family values.”

Rankin says he’s actually “a middle-of-the-road kind of candidate. My values are more in line with how we feel here in Oklahoma — I guess the old-fashioned type of Democrat.”

Staires, meanwhile, wrote in a candidate questionnaire this summer that “as a longtime Republican, I have demonstrated a consistent dedication to conservative Republican principles and proudly supported Donald Trump in 2016,” adding that he would “continue to stand on my conservative Republican principles to fight for conservative solutions against socialist policies.”

Staires, 58, grew up near Avant at the Shepherd’s Fold Christian camp, which his parents began in 1972. He graduated from Skiatook High School in 1982 and attended the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in education.

Staires was a teacher and coach in Oklahoma and Kansas for 15 years before he and his wife, Lisa Staires, returned to Oklahoma in 2002 to work in ministry through Shepherd’s Fold. The couple founded a private-sector consulting company, The Leadership Initiative, in 2012. They have two daughters.

Rankin, 63, grew up in Sand Springs and graduated from Charles Page High School in 1977. He attended Oklahoma State University, graduating in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture education and in 1986 with a doctorate in veterinary medicine.

He has owned Rankin Veterinary Hospital in Sand Springs for about 36 years, and he and his wife, Natalie Rankin, a native of Ukraine, both work in the clinic, along with two of their adult children. The couple have six adult children, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild between them.

Rankin served on the Sand Springs City Council for four years.

The candidates have plenty in common. Both are faith-driven Christians. Both support Second Amendment gun rights. Both support legislation that favors small-business owners. And they have surprisingly similar perspectives on one of the hottest issues in Oklahoma politics — school vouchers.

Both Staires and Rankin have some misgivings about vouchers, or scholarships, as proponents prefer to call them.

It’s likely that a majority of voters in HD 66 share those misgivings because a good bit of HD 66 is rural, and rural residents typically consider vouchers a threat to the public schools that are frequently the heart of their communities.

Another push for vouchers is expected next legislative session, particularly if Gov. Kevin Stitt wins reelection, but state House Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, appears to remain steadfast in his opposition, saying recently that Oklahoma’s new open-transfer law “is what parental choice done right looks like.”

Staires said at a Sand Springs Chamber of Commerce candidate forum in April: “I don’t know if I’m a supporter of the vouchers the way they are set up right now. However, giving the power and giving the choice to the parents to how they want their child to be educated is very important to me.”

He wrote in response to a later candidate questionnaire that “this issue begins with an important question: ‘Do you believe we have a civil responsibility to financially support public services like roads, schools (and) sanitation?’ I believe each of us have that responsibility for public services, and Oklahoma kids are worth investing in.”

“‘School Choice’ is already a reality through our open-transfer law. The voucher conversation is about how that choice will be funded. I am not in favor of using state revenues to pay for personal choice,” Staires wrote.

Rankin said at the April candidate forum that he could not support vouchers as they were presented in this past legislative session.

“I think there’s too many issues that were not very well-thought-out,” he said. “I’m not saying that I wouldn’t support vouchers. There might be a time when the kinks were all worked out that that might be a viable thing.

“But I can’t help but think that it really hurts our public education system by pulling dollars away from that, and as we know, our education system is so underfunded already.”

Lastly, although both candidates agree on their desire to serve, they have slightly different ideas about what is needed from them.

“I am seeking to serve first to honor God and secondly to offer a moderate voice in this extremely polarized political climate of 2022,” Rankin said, writing on his website that “to move forward in politics both sides have to agree that even though we can’t have everything we want we still have to move forward.”

Staires said in June that “more than anything, what I’m hearing is people are looking for leadership. They’re not happy with where we are right now as a country, but even as a state, there’s areas of dissatisfaction, and they are looking for experienced leaders in Oklahoma City.”

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