I just posted that I had looked up Tulsa on Wikipedia and found that it had a Republican mayor, which surprised me. Could you tell us more about the political make up of the city? Is most of the city council Democrats?
I live outside of Tulsa and have for over 15 years now, so I stopped following the city politics in detail quite awhile ago. However, since it saturates the local news, etc., it is hard to get away from it totally.
Tulsa has had a mix Republican/Democrat mayors for quite awhile now (current mayor Bartlett-R, and his immediate predecessors: Taylor-D, LaFortune-R, Savage-D). Same with the council make-up. Think RINO/plutocrat when you see Republican here. Tulsa is not a conservative bastion: it is more like the Austin of Oklahoma.
Tulsa’s city government is a mayor-council form of government, with no city manager (the mayor runs the city); and a more divisive, ineffective form of governance you couldn’t find. Tulsa has all sorts of weird zoning issues, high city taxes that are ineffectively spent, crony capitalism (i.e. political “friends” of both sides being funneled money and contracts), pet political projects “for the good of the city”, etc. It has some real problems that the monied folk in town refuse to allow to come to a fair and equitable vote. And, of course, the local media are in the pockets of the local plutocrats, so nothing ever gets reported correctly.
But, in spite of all this, it is still a pretty good place to live (compared to other places I have lived over the years), as a lot of this political nonsense really doesn’t affect the people as much as they would like it to. (The fights on the city council; and between the council and the mayor are good for a few laughs sometimes...) You can safely ignore a lot of the crap, especially if you live outside Tulsa proper in one of the larger “suburbs” such as Broken Arrow, Owasso, Sand Springs, etc. In fact, there is a movement of people out of the core of Tulsa into the outlying cities. If I am remembering this correctly, in the entire Tulsa metro region, there are more people living outside the City of Tulsa proper (i.e. in the surrounding cities) than inside the city, perhaps a 60/40 or 65/35 percentage.
The liberals here tend to be less confrontational and “in-your-face”, and less dangerous than politically active liberals I have seen on the coasts. We have our share of gay parades and festivals, etc., but most people view it with a grain of salt and generally attend these to buy good things, and to eat the food; not to support the cause.
In short, Tulsa is a somewhat more liberal bastion in than you would expect in Oklahoma (like Austin in Texas and has a similar reputation) but for the most part the expression of liberal causes and such is pretty benign (unlike Austin). Kind of a weird mix of conservative and progressive, but the extremes of both tend to cancel out into a more middle-of-the-road mix.
And that is probably more than you wanted to know about Tulsa...