In 2026 he became the fifth mayor<\/a> in the city\u2019s history to win three consecutive terms, with almost 87 percent of the vote. Since 2023, he has served both as mayor and as dean of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. Since 2025 he has been president of the United States Conference of Mayors, a term that will end in June.<\/p>\n For all these groundbreaking achievements, Holt\u2019s approach to governing is pragmatic and, in many ways, traditional.<\/p>\n In a conversation with Governing, Holt speaks about the challenges he and his colleagues share, their unique position in contemporary politics and the basis of their ability to get things done. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n These are difficult times for many people in America. You\u2019ve talked about the unique powers mayors have \u2014 how do those come into play at this moment?<\/p>\n I think we\u2019re the last level of government that people largely trust. There are a lot of reasons for that. We\u2019re closest to the people, and we have to produce results. Everybody at every level of government should produce results, but if we don\u2019t produce results, people will die.<\/p>\n We have to provide the core city services that you use 25 times a day and you truly rely upon. It forces us to be a little more serious. It forces us to bring people together, because you can\u2019t get things done without bringing people together across partisan lines.<\/p>\n Most mayors are elected in a system that is not a closed partisan primary. It\u2019s a system where all the voters get to see all of the candidates, and all of the candidates have to face all of the voters. That completely changes the incentive structure for everything that you do, the positions that you take and the things that you prioritize.<\/p>\n It means that when I run for mayor, I am incentivized to build a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents. I\u2019m working with the 70 percent of people in the middle, and I kind of ignore the far left and the far right.<\/p>\n I think mayors are increasingly relied upon for doing politics the way they were done in America for a couple hundred years. We\u2019re still compromising, we\u2019re still respecting pluralism. We\u2019re casting a vision that is both aspirational and pragmatic.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve been president of the conference of mayors in the past year. Are there challenges all, or most, mayors share?<\/p>\n We all have most of the same challenges, most of the same aspirations for our cities. Housing is the issue<\/a> that has the most commonality across the United States. We\u2019re all dealing with affordable housing shortages. We\u2019re sharing a lot of best practices on that front, whether it\u2019s regulatory reform or direct investment in affordable housing. We\u2019re also channeling that energy toward Washington as we try to get Congress to pass a comprehensive housing bill for the first time in decades.<\/p>\n Crime and law enforcement is an ongoing top priority for mayors. Largely, we\u2019ve spent the last year celebrating some historic success. Going back two or three years, we have seen dramatic declines in crime. We\u2019re wanting people to know about that and also continuing to study to understand exactly why that happened.<\/p>\n Over the last decade, cities and mayors have better understood how to tackle crime \u2014 not at the moment of its occurrence, but to be focused on prevention and intervention. A youth center is a crime prevention strategy. The investments you make in your young people, your economy and a lot of other things can be just as important as your investments in direct law enforcement activity.<\/p>\n How are mayors dealing with a changing relationship to the federal government?<\/p>\n Another major commonality that all mayors have right now is that we have to offset the lack of inclusivity that political leaders at the state and federal level are currently projecting. Unfortunately, you have elected officials today who explicitly divide their constituencies, and explicitly say, \u201cI\u2019m representing this group. I am not representing this group \u2014 and in fact, this group is maybe even an enemy to me and my group.\u201d<\/p>\n David Holt is nearing the end of a term as president of the United States Conference of Mayors. “We’re dealing with so many of the same challenges and we just want to do what works. We don’t really care whether that policy prescription falls neatly into somebody’s party platform,” he says.<\/p>\n (Oklahoma City)<\/p>\n That flies in the face of how American democracy has worked for centuries. It was always understood that once the election is over, you serve everybody. We\u2019ll have another election and we\u2019ll hash it out then \u2014 but in the meantime, you represent everybody, even the people who didn\u2019t vote for you, even the people you think you disagree with.<\/p>\n Mayors still carry that ethos, and now it\u2019s even more of an obligation for us. It\u2019s rhetorical and symbolic, but it\u2019s also material and practical. The activities that we do collectively should meet the needs of people from all perspectives, all backgrounds, all political parties, all socioeconomic levels, genders, ethnicity, religion.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m saying is not groundbreaking, except in the current political environment where you have people withholding disaster relief<\/a> because of the way a state voted<\/a>. That kind of othering of your constituency is something we just consider absolutely off the table as mayors.<\/p>\n Is this a bipartisan view among mayors?<\/p>\n It\u2019s very bipartisan, both within our cities and within our organization [Conference of Mayors]. You can go to our mayoral meetings, and you really can\u2019t tell who\u2019s a Republican and who\u2019s a Democrat.<\/p>\n We\u2019re dealing with so many of the same challenges and we just want to do what works. We don\u2019t really care whether that policy prescription falls neatly into somebody\u2019s party platform.<\/p>\n Do you think the public realizes this is the spirit at the local level?<\/p>\n Not necessarily, because the media ecosystem is not incentivized to cover what\u2019s happening in local communities. The cable news networks are hyperfocused on the entertainment politics in Washington that\u2019s not very serious. It\u2019s fueled by conflict, and that makes for good TV. They\u2019re not looking enough at local communities and what is happening there, what is happening in the brother- and sisterhood of mayors across the country, how bipartisan we are.<\/p>\n I wish the public understood how common this is for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayors may be the last level of government to retain a degree of public trust, says Oklahoma City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-583174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"mayor-david-holt-2025-headshot.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/erepublic.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/b7c8790\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/480x640+0+0\/resize\/330x440!\/quality\/90\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ferepublic-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2F4f%2Fe8%2Fef50c4434b54a1df64781d0e3027%2Fmayor-david-holt-2025-headshot.jpg\")
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