Just days after the conclusion of the November, 2024 election, the sun was just dropping into the western sky over Oklahoma’s capital city, illuminating the exchange between newly elected state Rep. Ryan Eaves and his two new compatriots. A thoughtful observer couldn’t help but note: Eaves wasn’t in Atoka anymore. He was about to enter the capital-city machine. The Borg was calling, and it demanded assimilation.
The event?
It no doubt baffled the average Oklahoman, who might mistakenly presume that once the general election takes place, political fundraising takes a break. It was a political fundraiser headed by one of Oklahoma’s most powerful politicians, incoming House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, and attended by a who’s who of lobbyists and monied special interests.
Why, one might ask, would politicians be holding a fundraiser just one month after the conclusion of the 2024 election cycle? This wasn’t 2026. The politicians, even if they knew they would be running again in two years, almost certainly didn’t know whether they would have the grave misfortune of facing a brave opponent willing to play the rigged game—a game that ensures incumbents are reelected at a rate that would make the Soviet Politburo blush.
To understand this phenomenon, one must first understand the dastardly nature of the system.
One of the OSC subscribers recently wrote in, asking for an article describing how the tentacles of monied special interests reach through consultants to ruin Oklahoma’s officeholders long before they are actually officeholders—while they are still candidates.
It’s an analysis I’ve developed over many years of observing election cycles, and one I will include in my upcoming book on the science of running for office as a grassroots candidate. The book will serve as a practical guide to challenging for a state House seat on a limited budget, using a standardized set of strategies. Applied consistently over time by a candidate—or a team of candidates—willing to adopt a House district and persist until the voters seat them, those strategies educate the public until such time as the people reclaim their House seat from monied special interests and their political enablers.
Knowing how consultants drive good candidates into the hands of monied special interests—and being able to explain it—is a vital part of educating those candidates while they are still in a position to save their own souls.
It is truly a mission, not just for the people of the district, but for the candidate. He is someone entering a dark place, thinking it is going to be a great adventure. But for most, it is truly a path to a destination that, in the long run, will benefit neither the candidate nor those who know and support him.
Put simply: Human beings aren’t designed for long-term exposure to massive power and its second-order effects. Unless he understands what is happening and can establish lines of defense early, he stands little chance of holding his own.
First and foremost, he needs to understand what drives his political consultant: It’s money, of course.
That consultant needs the candidate to spend money—even when it requires the candidate to take out debt. The consultant often makes money when the candidate spends his, profiting from that spending by passing along inflated prices or perhaps taking a percentage from the vendor.
The logic?
The enticement used by the consultant to keep the money flowing?
“Spend just a little more. Just one more poll. Just one more mailer. We are so close.
If you win, the lobbyists will pay off your debt. And the polling says we can win this; we just need a little more spending.”
Not wanting to have wasted all the time and money previously committed to the endeavor, the candidate is hard-pressed not to chip in that last $10,000—or maybe $20,000.
So the consultant wins no matter what happens. And maybe the consultant was right. Perhaps that last wave of expenditures really is just enough to push the candidate over the top.
But the candidate? He wins only if he loses and, through some twist of fate, isn’t sent to the big capital city to become beholden to the special interests that would pay off his debt.
Sure, he will have to work hard and pay it off on his own. But he will still be in the real world—and he will not be owned by others.
The “winner” of the race—the candidate whose campaign now owes him thousands of dollars, with the assurance that lobbyists will help pay it off—will spend his first months in office worrying about how to restore his personal finances and save enough money to discourage future challengers from taking him on.
This means keeping an array of the state’s special interests happy. And doing that not only requires the candidate to mindlessly repeat the most-told lie of the politicians, “I don’t let that money affect my vote,” but requires violating many of the principles he purported to hold as a candidate.
Reconciling these two competing interests—principle versus money—is the art that rots the brain. It is about embracing the cognitive dissonance required to convince oneself that it is acceptable to betray one’s word if it is done for some greater purpose.
Perhaps that purpose is running for higher office. Maybe it is simply loyalty to one’s own personal budget—a budget that feeds the family and makes the house payment. But whatever it is, it is at odds with truth and honesty. And the process of reconciling the two takes what once was an honest individual and turns him into a slimy politician.
So, when that idealistic, hopeful, positive candidate for office goes to hire a consultant, he must know and understand the intensity and seriousness of the game that is about to ensue. And when that consultant suggests, “Just spend another $20,000. The lobbyists will take care of it,” he must be prepared to see it for what it is: the road to perdition.
And it’s not just about driving the candidate into the hands of the lobbyists, either. It’s about sending him to become a pawn of the state’s alpha politicians—the ones who do their best to place themselves between the lobbyist and the recipient in order to launder the loyalty. Why should the lobbyists get all the credit for saving the candidate from personal bankruptcy when an alpha politician can broker the deal and earn the trust and support of new legislators for his own ambitions?
When that new candidate allows the consultant to drive him into the arms of the lobbyists, their PACs, the politicians and other elements of the Capitol swamp, it is the machine perpetuating a sick, dishonest status quo. And it all starts with that innocent suggestion: Just one more mailer, one more text message, one more direct-to-TV commercial, just one more personal loan—and victory is assured.
And one would certainly be right to suspect that, as Ryan Eaves made his way into that capital-city event venue on that late afternoon in early December, he had no clue as to his destination: intended assimilation.
To his right walked patient zero of the game: one of leadership’s high-ranking yes-men, floor leader John Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer managed to be in the room with leadership for most of his legislative tenure, rarely voting no and likely becoming the one most abused by the system. Reportedly, he was the fall guy who had to take the heat when leadership reneged on a commitment to hear a bill, leaving the downtrodden Pfeiffer to break the bad news: “We don’t have ‘time’ to hear your bill.”
To his left—that was Marcus McEntire, the now-former state representative who had just walked away from his seat after a bitter final term in which his disgruntlement with the conservative electorate was front and center in the corporate press. The press so enjoys highlighting disgruntled Republican legislators who are unable to come to terms with the fact that their own electorates do not share their liberal worldview.
Now, to the person who wasn’t in the know, this seemed very strange. Why was McEntire escorting Eaves to the slaughter? Shouldn’t he be back home in Duncan, in the real world?
That, of course, is the big joke.
McEntire was already transitioning into the good life: lobbyist. It was a shocking abuse that another legislative freshman, Rep. Jim Shaw would rightly recognize and attempt to shut down with his House Bill 3727. The bill met its fate in a stinging 2–6 committee vote in February—a vote that told you everything you needed to know about those who opposed it: an unholy coalition of establishment Republicans and liberal Democrats. Yes, even though lobbyists funnel so much to establishment Republicans, the Democrats stay on board with the legalized corruption of allowing politicians in the revolving door to transition into lobbyist without a cooling off period.
So, in that one picture, we had the proverbial 1,000 words: the freshman taking his first step into the Borg, escorted by the machine’s foremost yes-man on one side and the leftist legislator, now turned special-interest lobbyist, on the other.
Once inside, the freshman legislators had their campaign funds augmented with thousands of dollars in contributions.
And, of course, most quickly fell, just days later, voting the party line to advance the most authoritarian, nontransparent rules package in modern legislative history while tabling reform proposals.
So, the question becomes: What is the answer?
First and foremost, it is incumbent upon readers just like you to educate your incoming freshman representatives.
Were I to defend those freshman legislators who were making bank at that 2024 event, I would suggest that they had no clue. They went in blind. And that is a defense for them.
But the next class of freshmen mustn’t be given that defense.
For you, the reader, must give them—and future generations of candidates—the truth: the knowledge that the greatest lie told in the Legislature is, “I can take the lobbyists’ money without it affecting me.”
Then, it is incumbent upon the people of Oklahoma—the normies, those who aren’t trapped in the capital-city mindset—to continue building, organizing and getting stronger. They must reach the point at which the brave candidates who do know the truth will not just reject the sick system, but will also have a viable alternative: a real option to govern without taking special-interest money and without going into debt to pay the consultant-and-vendor ecosystem.
My belief: It would take a group of dedicated individuals in each House district who will, first, dig-in, understand the many bad votes being cast by their legislator and know how to explain them and educate the local electorate and, second, dedicate the time and energy necessary to reclaim their district. This will transform the state, officially recapturing it from the institutionalists and placing the people’s House where it truly belongs: in the hands of the people.
Much more is to come as we explore the means and methods by which we could make this happen, one House district at a time.
Stay tuned!
Did you know? Original news and opinion articles published by Oklahoma State Capital Media may be republished free of charge under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license and OSC’s editorial permissions. Learn more: here.
How the Monied Special Interests Reach Lawmakers Before the Voters Can
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog
September 15, 2026 at 08:18AM - J Murphey
RSS Feed
