Senate District 26 voters re-elected Sen. Darcy Jech of Kingfisher for his third and final term by a margin of 52.3% Tuesday.

Jech earned 4,186 of the votes district-wide to 3,819 for challenger Brady Butler in the Republican runoff primary election.

He carried four of the five counties in his district (Blaine 53.5%, Caddo 51.7%, Canadian 51.25% and Kingfisher 59.3%), while Butler carried Custer County by 52.3%.

More than a fifth of Jech’s votes came from Kingfisher County, where Republicans cast 1,030 votes in his favor to 707 for Butler, and Jech won six of the eight precincts.

“Kingfisher was good to us,” Jech said. “Our winning margin came from Kingfisher and I’m very grateful for my hometown and the support I got from them.”

With only Republicans filing for the seat, the runoff decided the election.

“I’m very proud to represent Kingfisher and this area. I’ve been fortunate to serve with my neighbors on the chamber, the hospital board, the industrial foundation and the city commission,” he said. “However effective I am, I think I owe a lot of it to the people I’ve been around who’ve helped me do the job I have now.”

Jech, a longtime insurance agent, said he had no political aspirations until he was contacted by the late Mike Johnson, a former three-term state senator, who encouraged Jech to run for the open District 26 seat in 2014.

“From that point on, Mike was a mentor and confidante of mine and I miss him a lot,” Jech said of Johnson, who died last month at the age of 78.

After winning his first term in a close election, Jech was re-elected to a second four-year term without drawing an opponent.

Running for his third term included the challenges of facing not one, but two primary opponents and campaigning in new counties after 2020 redistricting.

“We picked up Clinton and Weatherford in the redistricting process so any advantage I might have had as an incumbent, I didn’t have there,” he said.

Jech said he’s humbled by the number of people who helped with the campaign, doing everything from stuffing envelopes to knocking on doors in 103-degree July and August heat.

“My wife Vicky was a trouper, with me every step of the way,” he said. “This was an arduous campaign and could be a bit of a grind, but she was with me through it all.”

The strategy he credits with winning the election – good old fashioned face-to-face campaigning on 2,300 doorsteps along 11,000 miles within his district – will also make him even more effective in his last term, he said.

[See Jech, Page 2] “Nothing is more grassroots to a candidate and his constituents than that one-on-one interaction on the doorstep,” he said. “I did a lot more listening than I did talking and I learned from that.

“I’ve learned about individual issues across the district that I’m looking forward to working on in my next term and hopefully helping with.”

More broadly, Jech also has his eye on other issues he hopes to advance in the next four years.

“I am concerned with the population decrease in Western Oklahoma and what we can do to bring jobs back to my district,” he said. “Education, health care and infrastructure needs like roads and bridges will play into that economic development and jobs equation.”

Continuing the work of criminal justice reform is also a priority.

“I’m not the first one who said it, but I believe that we can be tough on crime but also be smart on crime,” he said. “We’ve made some inroads but that’s important to me going forward.”

Jech also wants to continue the work of tightening up regulations regarding the medical marijuana industry while still remaining true to the intent of State Question 788, the initiative petition approved by voters to make it legal.

After the state approved a long-overdue 30% pay raise for members of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Jech wants to make regular adjustments in salaries for all state workers.

“I don’t want us to feel that we’ve checked the box with teachers because we gave them a raise four years ago,” he said. “Those kinds of things need to be ongoing so that we don’t look up and find ourselves behind again, not just with education and public safety, but state employees in general.”

In the face of a $3 billion and growing state budget surplus, Jech wants to “take a look at the overall tax structure.”

“If there’s a better way to do that and a more fair way to do that, we need to look at it,” he said.

Jech credits part of his success in the Senate with his ability to collaborate across the aisle to accomplish goals that benefit all Oklahomans.

“Compromise sometimes seems like a dirty word, but there has to be collaboration,” he said. “Everyone is not going to get everything they want and you have to work across the aisle.

“There are certainly basic issues that we’re never going to agree on, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come to a point where I can have a better understanding of what they want to do and vice versa.”

Now that the election is in the rearview mirror, Jech said he and his wife will take a short Labor Day trip to visit their son and his family in Texas and then he’s diving right back in.

“I’ve got three interim studies scheduled before the next session,” he said. “There’s plenty to do that I haven’t been doing because of the demands of the campaign and I’m anxious to get back to work.”