ENID, Okla.– The typical topics for discussion among city leaders in the northwestern Oklahoma community of Enid include how to attract a new movie theater, the cost of operating a downtown arena and plans for a solar farm on the edge of town.
But the question looming for this community of just over 50,000 in the heart of the state’s corn plains is whether to oust a city council member with ties to white supremacist groups.
Judd Blevins, 42, an Iraq War veteran who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlotesville, Virginia, faces a recall election Tuesday, when voters in one of the city’s precincts will decide whether to put him in want to keep or opt for a position. instead for his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church. Although both Blevins and Patterson are Republicans, the race is nonpartisan and open to all registered voters in the district.
Even as the number of white nationalist groups in the United States stabilized at just over 100 chapters in 2022 after reaching an all-time high of 155 in 2019, experts monitoring hate group activity at the Southern Poverty Law Center say the movement legitimacy within the political mainstream. They cite as an example the presence of U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona at a 2022 event organized by a white nationalist.
The recall effort in Oklahoma was launched by two longtime Enid residents, best friends Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall, both Democrats in a county where Republicans have a nearly 4-to-1 advantage in voter registration. The two helped lead a signature campaign to recall Blevins for the ballot, getting 350 signatures from voters in the district, far more than the 240 they needed.
“There are people on the other side of the political spectrum who completely agree with us on this,” Presnall said. “This is not a Republican-Democratic issue. It is a Nazi and non-Nazi issue.”
Blevins acknowledged at a community forum Tuesday that he had participated in the Unite the Right rally, where white nationalists carried torches through the University of Virginia campus and chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”
He also admitted to being associated with Identity Evropa, a now-defunct white supremacist group that gained notoriety for its participation in the rally.
While he says he is now “opposed to all forms of racial hatred and racial discrimination,” Blevins also does not shy away from his history.
When asked at the forum to explain his involvement in the meeting and his ties to Identity Evropa, he responded: “Drawing attention to the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016: securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, reducing the anti-white hate that is so prevalent in media entertainment.”
Blevins’ response drew a bit of applause from some of the 150 people who gathered at Enid’s downtown arena for the forum in which the two candidates answered questions from the publisher of the local newspaper, Enid News. & Eagle, and a reporter for a local radio station.
But his election to the city council, even after the local newspaper published a story about his ties to white nationalism, has many residents of this conservative city concerned about its reputation, especially as city leaders try to recruit businesses and young professionals to the area.
“I’m surprised anyone still thinks that way today,” said Patrick Anderson, a lifelong Republican and local banker who represented Enid in the Senate for 12 years. “And then to find out that someone from our own community is involved is concerning and disappointing.
“It certainly does not reflect the views of our community.”
Although Enid is 75% white, Anderson said the community has long embraced diversity with an Air Force base that trains young pilots, a growing Hispanic population and a large contingent of Marshallese citizens.
Anderson said he believes a decline in newspaper readership, combined with voter apathy, especially in municipal elections, allowed a small group of hardcore Blevins supporters to help him achieve a narrow victory of just 36 votes over the incumbent, a fellow Republican. Only 808 of the approximately 5,600 registered voters in the district cast their ballots.
Father James Neal, pastor of Holy Orthodox Catholic Church in Enid, agrees with Anderson’s assessment.
“I think a lot of people in the community, including myself, thought he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support this ideology are very passionate and very committed, and so far we have not been that way.
“But this has galvanized us and helped us, quite frankly, get off our backs and fight back.”
Presnall, who helped launch the recall with her friend, agreed that the entire recall energizes the community’s left-leaning residents, who formed the Enid Social Justice Committee. While their focus lately has been on the recall, they want to move on to other issues important to the community, including homelessness and paying off student lunch debt at area schools.
“We found that together we have a good group that wants to do good things for the community,” Presnall said.
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