Oklahoma last week held a primary. Candidates who finished in first place without a majority vote had to enter the State's first run-off primary next week with No. 2 candidates.
Republican Senator William Bliss Pine was renominated by a clear majority. Ira A. Hill, State Senator, apparently won the Republican nomination for Governor over all comers.
Close contests in the Democratic lists threw final nominations over into the runoff. Thomas Pryor Gore, blind onetime (1907-21) Senator, sought his old seat "to see if a man can still be elected to the Senate on $1,000." Without money or managers but with a tongue slick with political sarcasm, he ran nip & tuck with Charles J. Wrightsman, wealthy Tulsa oilman, for the Democratic Senatorial nomination, while three onetime Oklahoma Governors trailed in the ruck.
The run-off for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination will be between Frank Buttram, wealthy Oklahoma City oilman and political neophyte and William Henry ("Alfalfa Bill"; Murray, onetime Congressman-at-large and president of the State's Constitutional Convention. Candidate Murray, sometimes known also as the "Tribune of Tishomingo," played on popular resentment against depressed economic conditions, dazzled cross-roads voters with a promise to eliminate ad valorem taxation and substitute for it a graduated tax on gross incomes to get money from "the corporate interests (oil and gas companies) now leeching the commonwealth." He made a hitchhiking campaign throughout the state as "The Poor Man's Friend," promised rain, a "Howdy" sign on the Governor's door. He sang:
The plain common people will never be still
Till Alfalfa Murray is Governor Bill.
All eight sitting Oklahoma members of the House were either renominated outright or polled a vote big enough to enter the runoff.
Kentucky in last week's primary first used its new election law requiring a 24-hour delay before ballot boxes were unsealed, the court begun. Senator John Marshall Robsion was unopposed for the Republican Senatorial Nomination to succeed himself. Judge Marvel Mills Logan had no opposition for the Democratic Senatorial Nomination. In only six of the state's eleven Congressional districts was it necessary to hold primaries for House nominations.
New York was amused to hear last week that Heywood Broun, big, shambling syndicated colyumist for the New York Telegram, would run as the Socialist candidate for the House of Representatives in the "silk stocking" district of Manhattan now represented by Congresswoman Ruth Baker Pratt.