Club for Growth-affiliated groups are pouring $4.3 million into Oklahoma’s governor’s race in another push to make school choice and religious education a centerpiece of Republican politics.
The ads target Republican state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running to replace term-limited Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), first elected in 2018, setting up an open race in Oklahoma this year. Nine Republicans, including Drummond, are running to succeed him.
The GOP field also includes former Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall and former Oklahoma state Sen. Mike Mazzei, while three Democrats—including state House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson and former state Sen. Connie Johnson—are running as well.
School Freedom Fund Oklahoma, which is affiliated with Club for Growth Action and School Freedom Fund, said it plans to spend on broadcast cable news, addressable satellite, CTV, and radio advertising beginning Wednesday.
“Gentner Drummond is an outspoken opponent of school freedom, and we’ll spend whatever it takes to keep him out of the Governor’s office,” David McIntosh, president of School Freedom Fund Oklahoma, said in a statement to Bloomberg Government.
The group has tied its campaign directly to Drummond’s opposition to St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and his role in the US Supreme Court dispute over the proposed school.
The campaign is one of the clearest signs that national conservative organizations are treating school choice—and, especially, fights over religious charter schools—as a litmus test in Republican primaries.
Drummond drew backlash from conservative education advocates after opposing public funding for St. Isidore, a proposed Catholic charter school that became one of the country’s biggest legal and political fights over public education and is now central to outside conservative groups’ case against him in the governor’s race.
The dispute reached the US Supreme Court in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, where the justices deadlocked 4-4 last year, leaving intact an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling blocking the school from operating as a publicly funded religious charter school.
As attorney general, Drummond argued the proposed school violated state and federal constitutional protections barring publicly funded religious schools. Supporters cast the fight as expanding protections for religious liberty in education, following recent Supreme Court rulings on public funding and religious institutions.
Expanding Playbook
The Oklahoma effort follows aggressive intervention campaigns by Club for Growth Action and allied groups in Republican primaries in Texas, Tennessee, and now West Virginia, where outside organizations have spent heavily to defeat GOP lawmakers viewed as obstacles to school choice legislation.
In Tennessee, School Freedom Fund and allied groups spent heavily in Republican primaries in 2024 against lawmakers who stood in the way of Gov. Bill Lee’s (R) school voucher plan. Four Republican incumbents lost after getting hit by a flood of outside ads focused on school choice and parental rights.
The organizations deployed a similar strategy in Texas, where Gov.
Club for Growth Action and allied groups said they ran 36 unique television ads across 14 state House districts targeting incumbents who opposed the legislation. Their efforts helped reshape the Texas House and eventually cleared a path for Abbott’s education agenda.
The groups said they invested nearly $8.5 million during the Texas House primaries and runoffs.
School Freedom Fund also said Wednesday it helped back 12 conservative candidates who won Republican legislative primaries in West Virginia on Tuesday, including challenger Charles Hartzog (R), who defeated House Finance Chairman Vernon Criss (R).
The group said it invested more than $1 million in the West Virginia primaries and framed the races as another test of whether Republican lawmakers who oppose school choice efforts could survive primary challenges backed by national conservative organizations.
Club for Growth Action and affiliated PACs separately invested $13.1 million supporting Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s (R) gubernatorial campaign in 2024, according to the organization.
The Oklahoma campaign suggests that outside conservative organizations are increasingly prepared to carry that political strategy beyond legislative contests into statewide races as education policy becomes a more defining divide in Republican politics.
School vouchers and education savings accounts have become increasingly mainstream within the GOP, but the fight over religious charter schools has exposed sharper divisions inside the party over constitutional questions and how far public education dollars should go toward funding religious institutions.
The Oklahoma race is expected to become one of the highest-profile tests yet of whether outside conservative groups can successfully pressure Republican statewide candidates who break with parts of the conservative movement on those issues.