This TED Talk features politician and mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, G.T. Bynum, recorded live at TEDx, Pennsylvania Avenue, 2017.

So last year, I ran for mayor of my hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I was the underdog. He was running against a two-term incumbent.

And my opponent ran the classic partisan playbook.

He publicized his endorsement of Donald Trump. He publicized a letter that he sent to President

Obama protesting Syrian refugees, even though none of them were coming to Tulsa. He ran ads on TV that my kids thought made me look like Voldemort and sent out little

gyms in the mail like this.

Never mind that America's most liberal labor union, as defined by this ad, was actually

the Tulsa Firefighters Union,

hardly a famed bastion of liberalism.

Never mind that while she was running for president and he was serving in his final year in that office,

Hillary Brock and I could just never find the time to get together and yuck it up about the

Tulsa Mayors race.

Never mind that I, like my opponent, am a Republican.

And so when something like this hits you in a campaign, you have to decide how you're going to respond.

And we had a novel idea.

What if, instead of responding with partisanship, we responded with a focus on results.

What if we ran a campaign that was not about running against

someone, but was about bringing people together behind a common vision? And so we decided to respond

not with a negative ad, but with something people find even sexier, data points.

And so we emphasize things like increasing per capita income in our city, increasing our city's population.

And we stuck to those relentlessly throughout the campaign, always bringing it back to those things by which

our voters could measure in a very transparent way how we were doing and hold me accountable

...