Part 1 of 2

– Ask a politician a question, even a simple one, and any office-seeker worth his weight in subsidies and campaign donations will undoubtedly respond with a lengthy answer that might address your query, but will likely also encompass several other points they wish to impart.

After 12 years in the Oklahoma House of Representatives – the last eight as the longest serving Speaker in state history – and one of seven gubernatorial candidates for 2026, Charles McCall knows what he wants for the state’s future, and has no shortage of words.

Among McCall’s platform planks are:

• Zero personal income tax

• Ad valorem taxes frozen at age 62

• Safeguarding rural healthcare

• Improving the state’s education profile

• Shepherding a fiscal surplus for state coffers

• Cultivating a relationship with Native American tribes

• An Oklahoma First agenda “I have the most experience and am the most qualified, and I’ve got a proven record of delivering,” says McCall, a Republican from Atoka. “My motivation to run for governor is, I just want the state, I want the people in the state to do better.”

McCall’s background is in banking, where he’s been with the family bank for 34 years, and bases his political philosophy on advice from his father.

“My dad told me on Day One, ‘The only way to be successful in small community banking is you’ve got to go make someone else successful first’,” the gubernatorial candidate recalls. “‘They do well, you’ll be fine. But if they fail, you fail. If the community doesn’t do well, we don’t do well.’

“I see public service very much the same. What government should do is set the right environment for families to do well and businesses to do well. And if that happens, the state’s going to do well. The state of Oklahoma cannot outperform the communities within it and the people. So that was my philosophy when I was state rep – that continues to drive me – and that’ll be my philosophy as the governor,” McCall says.

“I’m excited to try to be a catalyst for positive change and growth for our families. These offices aren’t worth having unless you go get big things done,” he says. “I don’t believe we have A-rated governors or Speakers, or D-rated ones. It’s pass or fail. Either you get it done, or you don’t.

“I want to get us to zero on the personal income tax. I’m campaigning on it, and when you campaign on something, that’s what you will be measured on,” McCall decides.

He also says a leader needs to be prepared for things that are unforeseen. As Speaker of the House from 2017-25, McCall says he saw everything from COVID, a 10-day winter storm “that we hadn’t had the likes of in a hundred years to unprecedented amount of inflation we hadn’t seen in 40 years – that was all Washington- driven just with printing stimulus money. There’s going to be unforeseen things happen. I believe we need a governor that has proven leadership, and positive, proven outcomes.”

— Courting Rural Oklahoma

McCall is proud of his rural roots, noting that “I’m the only rural guy in the race. Rural Oklahoma is about 95% of our state’s geography. But at the end of the day, public service is about people, and if you can help people and communities do better, the state will be better. We were able to do a lot of things while I was Speaker of the House, the longest serving Speaker in the state’s history. I served eight years as Speaker, 12 total years in the House of Representatives. I saw the worst of times in this state financially, and came into the speakership at the pinnacle of bad times: No reserves, failing economy, fouryear contraction cycle. But we got that turned around. It was important for me at that time to get a teacher pay raise done. Our teachers hadn’t had a pay raise in over 10 years. We didn’t do just one, we got three of them done. We put 1.5 billion new reoccurring dollars of additional new funding into public education. We did that over a six-year period, and that’s more money than the previous 23 years of our state’s history. Education has always been a priority of mine, and will continue to be.”

McCall, who is a lifelong resident of Atoka and says he will continue to make the city his home, believes rural Oklahoma is the lynchpin for ascending to the governor’s mansion.

“Rural Oklahoma is very important to me. Rural Oklahoma is significant. I believe rural Oklahoma put Kevin Stitt in the governor’s office both times.

“It has been great to meet people, and listen to people,” McCall says of campaigning across the state. “I think campaigns are about listening. You can share some of the big ideas that can make things better for people, but what’s important to me is ‘What are families struggling with? What are they talking about around the kitchen table at night?’ Those are the things that we focused on when I was leading the House, and that’s what I’m going to continue to do.

“In rural Oklahoma, there are different pressing issues in different parts of the state. But the one common thing, I believe, throughout the state is we have some really wonderful people. There are people who are focused on different things in their lives and for their families, but overall, we just have a really good people.

“I think Oklahoma’s best days are ahead of it. I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t think so. And quite honestly, I think that rural Oklahoma, for the first time in a very, very long time, has more opportunity for investment and economic development than we’ve seen in scores of years. I’m excited about that,” McCall says. “Great people in Oklahoma, that’s what I think makes us the best state in the country, and we’re going to work hard to continue to expand the economy here in Oklahoma. I’m really excited, and I’m going to be focused, not just on the metropolitan areas, but the other 95% of the state.”

— Protections vs. Limits McCall will be the first to tell you freedoms and liberties are very important to him, but he recognizes that government has a natural inclination to chip away at them.

“We spent a lot of our time protecting our Second Amendment and restoring some of those rights with constitutional carry while I was Speaker, and we protected women in sports. We banned boys from girls bathrooms and locker rooms. And we banned gender-reassignment surgeries for minors. We passed the toughest immigration laws in the country. Ended green energy subsidies,” he points out.

But when voters passed an initiative petition question to legalize marijuana, McCall says it created “kind of a wild west scenario” for the state, and “really created the most progressive form of medical marijuana in the country.”

But in practice, Mc-Call says foreign entities and “every cartel in the globe” were operating illegal grow operations. Early on, there were about 9,000 grow licenses, he says, which have been reduced to about 1,700, “and they’ll be below probably 700 next year.”

As governor, McCall promises to find and seize illegal grow operations, and will prosecute those involved, followed by auctioning off land seized, with proceeds benefitting schools, as well as county road and bridge projects.

“I’m going to find it all, and we’re going to root it out, and we’re going to take it back,” he says.

Among the accomplishments McCall lauds from his stint in the House is inheriting “a failing economy” with no reserves, to $5 billion in reserves when he left the Legislature. “And we did that all while we were cutting taxes. We cut the personal income tax and the corporate income tax, but we eliminated the grocery tax, the franchise tax and the marriage tax,” a recollection that segued into his primary campaign plank.

“It’s important to me, and I think it’s important for the state of Oklahoma, to get to zero on the personal income tax. I don’t think we should tax people’s productivity. We should incentivize people to be more productive, to work harder, and if you get to keep what you make, keep more of it, that’s a great incentive,” McCall says. “And I believe that we can get to zero without harming funding for core services. Every time we cut the personal income tax when I was in the Legislature, revenues didn’t go down, they went up. There’s some people that are concerned about what’s going to happen to that revenue if you go to zero. Nothing happens to it. It’s your money. The government just took less of it. You get to decide how to spend it. It comes back to the state.”

In 2017, his first year as Speaker, McCall says the state budget was $6 billion. When he left, the budget was $13.2 billion, “and we still had $5 billion in reserves. We were only appropriating about 89% of the money, trying to give money back to people to help them combat inflation. I think if we continue to stay on the path to eliminating the personal income tax, it’ll be great for everybody in our state, and I think it’ll make us more attractive, too, for business and industry.”

Another buttress for his campaign is freezing ad valorem taxes for those age 62 and older.

“I believe at age 62 you should have certainty on your ad valorem taxes they should be frozen. When you hit 62, you’re surely thinking about wanting to retire, and you’re planning for that. And I think on your homestead, your property taxes shouldn’t be able to be escalated,” says McCall, 55. “And we can do that without harming our schools and our county governments, I believe. A lot of people don’t understand that ad valorem taxes do not go to the state of Oklahoma. They go to the counties. About 80% of it goes to the school district that the lands owned in, and about 20% of it goes to fund county government. But I think if you freeze it at 62 and just stop the escalation of it, it’s not going to harm our smaller counties.”

— Flunking in Education No prognostications about Oklahoma’s future are complete without an autopsy of the state’s education system.

“On the education front, there’s one group that has us ranked 50th in education outcomes. That’s a big problem for me. I don’t like that. I don’t like to be last in anything,” McCall says. “In fact, I want to be the very best in everything. And I believe we can move those education rankings up. We’ve seen other states do it, so all we need’s a plan, [and] stick with it. Mississippi went from behind us to 15th, so they’ve proven that can be done, and we can incorporate some of those components in Oklahoma, and move those up.”

So what should the governor do?

“First of all, the governor of the state of Oklahoma is not elected, per se, to oversee education or education policy,” Mc-Call points out. “However, the governor does have the appointments to the State Board of Education, with the State Superintendent of Education being the chair of that board. Traditionally, the state and the people have viewed the State Superintendent of Education as the person who’s supposed to lead on education. But I’m going to lean in as the governor, even though I don’t have direct control, but I’m going to lean in and I’m going to expect some improvement.

“You can look at the Mississippi Miracle, and you can look and see kind of what Mississippi did when they had a similar situation – low reading sufficiency scores, low math scores – and some of those decisions that they made have really paid off for them. And that’s what needs to happen in Oklahoma.

“It’s really not a legislative problem anymore. The Legislature’s done what it needed to do. It got the funding way, way, way up. It was important for me, for rural schools, to make sure that they were funded to a level that, even the smallest school that doesn’t have very many students or just doesn’t have the local economic base, that they received enough investment that they’re not looking at closing their doors in 12 months or 60 months.

“But we’ve never had a comprehensive education plan that we’ve pulled all the stakeholders together, figured out how we’re going to … The metric is the metric. We know where we’re deficient, we just need a comprehensive plan to get those scores up. We need a plan that everybody will buy into and stick with it. That’s hard to get the Legislature to do it, but I think they want to do it,” McCall says.

“In the House of Representatives, we’re on a two-year election cycle, so if something’s not working in 12 months, change. What we really need is a comprehensive plan and stick with it. This is very similar to what we have done in Oklahoma with roads and bridges. We used to be 48th in the nation in roads and bridge infrastructure, but an eightyear road and bridge plan was put together about 15 to 20 years ago, and the state has stuck with that plan, and they funded it year after year. And we went from 48th to the fifth best in the country. So we can do that, too, in education.”

— Editor’s Note: See the remainder of this article, which highlights McCall’s achievements and opinions on President Trump, in next week’s edition of the Henryetta Free-Lance.