Former Secretary of Public Safety Chip Keating launched his campaign for governor today, touting his time as an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper, calling for the state to become a “made-in-America manufacturing magnet” and pledging to “do what is right, and do it without hesitation.”
“Today we face new threats, and they demand strength,” Keating told the crowd at an OCPAC Foundation luncheon Wednesday. “For heaven’s sake, we have the cartels and foreign governments running marijuana grow operations in our backyard.”
While Keating’s speech avoided mentioning his top GOP primary competitors by name — Attorney General Gentner Drummond and former Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall — he suggested that their work in elected office failed to find solutions to problems affecting the public.
“Our farmland is being bought by straw men pretending to be our friends. We are still dealing with the aftermath of the failed Joe Biden open-border policies. Our education system has fallen behind every state. Addiction and homelessness are out of control. Our tax and regulatory system are outdated and hurting working families and businesses,” Keating said. “If the very politicians now running for governor had fixed what they promised to fix when they were in office, we’d be in better shape. But they didn’t, and they won’t. I wanted to find someone else to run for governor and have them lead our state forward. But sometimes the challenge you see is looking back at you and daring you to take it on.”
As Keating finished his speech, a pair of political operatives from McCall’s campaign exited the room. On Monday, McCall’s hired pollster — Chris Wilson — released a poll showing the 2026 Republican gubernatorial primary as a dead heat between the two bankers, Drummond and McCall.
About 30 minutes before Keating took to the Oklahoma History Center stage for the OCPAC event, McCall’s campaign distributed a press release criticizing Keating’s time serving on the board of OU Health, the nonprofit wing of OU’s fully-integrated academic health center.
“Every candidate who enters this race owes voters a clear account of their record,” McCall said in the release. “While I’ve fought to protect children and preserve Oklahoma values, Chip Keating was sitting on the board of a hospital performing transgender surgeries on minors. That’s not conservative leadership. It’s caving to the radical left.”
McCall’s campaign has attempted to make the topic of transgender surgery a wedge issue in the 2026 GOP primary, releasing a television ad this week in which he slices a banana in half while grinning and saying, “I have a simple message for any lunatic pushing sex changes for kids: You first.”
Keating, however, said during his OCPAC remarks that he was integral to OU Health’s September 2022 decision to eliminate certain trans-supportive services — including surgeries and counseling — days ahead of the Oklahoma Legislature’s passage of a bill that fall during special session prohibiting funding for entities engaged in such care.
“As a board member of OU Health, I’ve seen firsthand how liberal agendas try to infiltrate our institutions,” Keating said. “That’s why I led the board’s charge against dangerous hormonal therapy being pushed on kids, because protecting our kids from harm — whether it’s in a hospital or our schools — is the most important job of all.”
After the event, Keating responded further to McCall’s criticism, saying OU Health “took action immediately” and stopped a “rogue doctor” within the organization.
“Charles McCall was in office for 4,000 days,” Keating said. “OU Health is funded by the state of Oklahoma, and Charles McCall was speaker of the House when the funding went there. I’m being sued by the trans lobby, not Charles McCall.”
In terms of Drummond — the race’s frontrunner for months — Keating said voters need to learn more about how BlueSky Bank provides banking services for companies in the marijuana industry despite the federal government’s continued classification of marijuana as an illegal substance.
“I’m actually the only law enforcement candidate in this race, who has actually worked on the streets and actually been in fights and has actually been in gun fights and has actually arrested the kind of people who are plaguing our state in the marijuana industry, and I think it’s very hypocritical that the AG claims to be out there as this top cop — top enforcer — against medical marijuana, yet he profits from it at his bank, BlueSky Bank, and they’re in the marijuana lending business,” Keating said. “It’s still not legal federally. (…) So banking marijuana money across states is money laundering.”
Drummond’s campaign manager, Stephanie Alexander, declined to join in on the day’s negative remarks from Keating and McCall.
“Gentner Drummond is focused on promoting his positive agenda for Oklahoma’s future that includes improving education, protecting our tax dollars and standing with President Trump to deport criminal illegals and put America first,” Alexander said.
‘A lot of corruption goes unchecked in this state’
Candidates will file for Oklahoma’s 2026 election cycle in April, but the June 16 primary election date means Republican candidates have fewer than 260 days to raise their profiles and make their cases to GOP voters.
Keating, born Francis Anthony Keating III, has deep connections with parts of Oklahoma’s Republican Party. His father, Frank Keating, served as governor from 1995 to 2003. Chip was 14 when the family moved into the governor’s mansion, and rumors of his desire to return have percolated for the last year. After graduating from Bishop McGuinness High School and Southern Methodist University, he worked as an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper and real estate broker.
“We need a leader smart enough to find solutions and loyal enough to the people of Oklahoma,” Keating said Wednesday.
After an unsuccessful run for the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 2006, he worked for Chesapeake Energy before starting Keating Investments in 2010. Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Keating as Oklahoma secretary of public safety in 2019, a position from which he resigned at the end of 2020. Even after departing that Cabinet position, Keating pushed for the long-discussed idea of law enforcement unification, criticizing Oklahoma for lacking a top law enforcement agency that has authority to initiate criminal investigations and corruption inquiries transparently, without being requested to do so by an elected official.
“A lot of corruption goes unchecked in this state,” Keating told NonDoc in 2022. “There have been some (instances) recently that have taken eight years to handle an investigation, and as a taxpayer in the state of Oklahoma, that’s not acceptable. I am looking for more transparency as a taxpayer for when we identify [an investigation] — that we viciously either exonerate or prosecute and move it on and be efficient.”
Since leaving public office, Keating has remained active in Republican politics. In 2024, he helped fund a PAC that ran advertisements against then-Senate Floor Leader Greg McCortney. McCortney, who had been positioned to take the Senate’s top position in 2025, lost his reelection campaign in the GOP primary.
Other gubernatorial candidates already campaigning
Officially, Keating becomes the seventh Republican to launch a campaign for governor in 2026.
Leisa Mitchell Hayes, a former city manager, became the first Republican candidate to officially launch a 2026 gubernatorial quest, but her campaign has generated little momentum. Attorney General Gentner Drummond launched his campaign in Pawhuska in January, marking the first major candidate announcement of the cycle. He was followed by former Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall and former Sen. Mike Mazzei (R-Tulsa). Podcaster and former Sen. Jake Merrick (R-OKC) has also entered the race, as well as businessman Kenneth Sturgell.
On the Democratic side, House Minority Leader Rep. Cyndi Munson (D-OKC) is the only candidate to announce a campaign so far. Democrats have not won a statewide election since 2006, when incumbent Gov. Brad Henry, Lt. Gov. Jari Askins, Attorney General Drew Edmondson and Superintendent of Public Instruction Sandy Garrett won their reelections. The last Democrat to hold statewide office was Joy Hofmeister after she switched parties in 2021 to campaign for governor in 2022.
