CIVPAC has published its evaluation of the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Oklahoma. After reviewing all five candidates, we are not making an endorsement at this time.
The field offers Oklahoma voters unusually different choices: Republican Kevin Hern, Democrat N’Kiyla “Jasmine” Thomas, Libertarian Sevier White, and independents Ron Meinhardt and Curtis Stinnett.
Hern has the most extensive governing record and overlaps with CIVPAC on markets, taxation, regulation and fiscal discipline. But we have substantial differences with him over the 2020 election, presidential power, Ukraine, abortion and his close identification with President Trump.
Thomas offers a detailed domestic agenda and takes positions we regard as reasonable on a number of civil-rights, reproductive-choice and health-care issues. But her economic program would give the federal government a substantially larger role than CIVPAC supports, and important questions remain about fiscal and foreign policy.
Meinhardt’s emphasis on constitutional limits, congressional war powers and putting principle ahead of party machinery deserves attention. But his abortion position differs sharply from ours, and we found too many unanswered questions about his positions on major national and international issues.
Stinnett has produced an unusually detailed policy program. We appreciate the effort to confront difficult issues directly, but many of his proposals would move considerably farther toward federal direction of health care, wages, credit and resource allocation than CIVPAC favors.
There is simply too little publicly available information about White’s positions for us to make a meaningful comparison.
CIVPAC does not expect candidates to take centrist positions on every issue. We look instead at the overall combination of policy agreement, institutional responsibility, independence of judgment and willingness to confront difficult tradeoffs. In Oklahoma, none of the five candidates currently provides enough of that combination for us to make an endorsement.
