Oklahoma Democratic Party

The Oklahoma Democratic Party (ODP) is an Oklahoma political party affiliated with the Democratic Party. It and the Oklahoma Republican Party, are the state's two major parties.

The party dominated local politics in Oklahoma almost since the days of early statehood in 1907 to 1994. In national politics, the party became a dominant force beginning with the presidential election of 1932 and the Franklin D. Roosevelt political re-alignment. From 1932 to 1994, the majority of members of Congress from Oklahoma have been Democrats, and of the 28 men and women who have been elected to the office of Governor of Oklahoma, 22 have been Democrats.

However, the party has fared poorly since 1994; Democrats lost five out of six congressional races that year. Since then, they have won only a handful of seats, which they no longer hold. In response, the traditionally disorganized Oklahoma Democrats moved to create a more organized state party, hiring a professional executive director in 1995. Even so, ODP continued to decline in the 2000s, losing control of both the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Senate. In the 2008 Presidential Election, Oklahoma gave one of the lowest percentage of any state's vote to Barack Obama, second only to Wyoming. Since 2004, Republicans have won every county in Presidential Elections in Oklahoma.

As of January 21, 2025, there are 658,136 registered Democratic voters in Oklahoma. This marks an increase in absolute terms from 652,611 in 2024, but a relative decrease from 28.4% to 26.6% of registered voters.

The Oklahoma Democratic Party once dominated state politics for much of Oklahoma history from with its strength in greatest concentrations in Oklahoma's 5th congressional district and the southeastern part of the state.

Upon statehood, all but one of the Congressional seats was held by Democrats. The Democrats won eighteen of the twenty-one gubernatorial elections since its statehood in 1907. The Democratic Party held on average 81 percent of the seats in the state legislature between 1907 and 1973. With the onset of the Great Depression, the party gained even more influence for several decades

Democratic opposition to deficit spending in the late 1930s marked a growing conservative movement in the party, which led to a 1941 constitutional amendment requiring legislators to pass a balanced budget.

After the federal Voting Rights Act and congressional reapportionment in Oklahoma in the 1960s, black state lawmakers returned to the Oklahoma Legislature, this time many aligning with the Democratic Party and hailing from Tulsa or Oklahoma City.