Tennessee voted in Super Tuesday this year, i.e. four days ago. On Wednesday I see a note in the paper that there’s a Democratic Party county meeting on Saturday, today. I thought it was the usual yearly everybody-come-and-pay-your-dues and elect officers ’n’ shit.
Turns out it was a caucus. Now I see people hither and yon getting their bowels in an uproar about how “Democrats are disenfranchising people with Evil Caucuses!!|!” blah blah blah, so I thought I would explain how this works here, since I suspect this is the same procedure used in a lot of states. It probably always has been, but it never got any attention until a year when the candidate wasn’t already determined after South Carolina or so.
So here we go. What the state Dem. Party people do is take the votes as cast last Tuesday and break them down by county. The proportion cast for each candidate (who got to the 15% cutoff figure) is then determined. So what we were to do at this meeting was pick the individuals from this county who will go to the next level (organized by US House district, on Feb. 23). At that meeting will be decided the individuals who will go to the National Convention in Denver in August.
The number of delegates who will go was determined in the Tuesday, voting, primary. In the case of this county we will send 10 delegates to district. When everybody arrived they had a choice of signing in for HRC or BHO. After that was done we went into different rooms by preference: the HRC group got to pick 7 people (3 men, 4 women) and the BHO caucus got to pick 3 (2 men 1 woman.) These were the numbers that were sent to us by the state party officials based on national party rules for gender balance and state allocation by population of county and district.
This “caucus” stuff and the district one on the 23rd is only to determine who gets to bodily get on a plane for the Rocky Mountain High. Not which candidate gets more delegates.
So yeah it’s goofy and kinda disorganized. We never voted this early in the year before. Nobody knew what was going on, because in the past this was just pro-forma shit. You didn’t have the split-up-and-caucus-by-candidate stuff because the candidate was already known.
Just for personal background: I caucused with the BHO folks because they were the only ones handing out free bumper stickers (historic significance, etc.) They/we were a decided minority but I could not for the life of me see a statistically significant breakdown—maybe a slight trend for the younger folk to go with BHO, including two young white guys who have gotten locally active fairly recently, but that was about it. No split gender-wise at all. One family difference, both of whom interestingly enough were elected as delegates to the district: father for HRC, daughter for BHO.
Go figure. Lotsa kumbaya singing in our caucus anyway; delight to have two such wonderful candidates and fierce agreement to do whatever it takes to put one of them in the White House this fall.
Of course if I lived in Bangor, ME I could have been at a BHO rally for the last coupla hours, but some of us have all the luck…. :)
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Well, I didn't get into the Hillary Town Hall
goddammit. So I went back home and got back to work, instead of going in to the Bangor Arena (and if you’ve ever been to Bangor, it’s about the most sorry-assed excuse for an “arena” that you’ve ever seen.
Lots of students at the Hillary rally, which I thought was interesting. I mean, they had to get up on a Saturday morning…..
Tomorrow, I caucus!
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
nebraska clusterf*ck...
According to the AP (via TPM), it turns out that so many people have turned out for the Nebraska caucuses that roads have been closed, and the rules thrown out the window…
http://journalstar.com/articles/2008/02/…
Sarpy County had one caucus site for 28,000 registered Democrats, triggering traffic backups for miles and complaints from voters while changing the way officials conducted the caucus.
…Law enforcement shut down Highway 370 and the intersection leading into the site — a school cafeteria — because the area was packed with cars.
The influx of people was so massive that volunteers began collecting preference cards for people who preferred Obama or Clinton, then allowing them to leave. Traditional caucus procedures allow for more interaction, with supporters standing on either side of a room trying to persuade the undecided and not-so-sure supporters of other candidates to join them.
in other words, whoever loses in Nebraska is going to have excellent reason to demand that the delegation not be seated because of gross irregularities in the way that the caucuses were conducted…
Paul, I'm hearing that Michigan and Florida Democrats are
perhaps justifiably likely to contest the seating (or lack thereof) of those delegates based on the PARTY decisions after the states’ primary/caucus schedules were moved.
I have a feeling that “I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat” is going to come horribly true before much longer.
BTW: the Michigan ballot matters a lot because it’s a heavily Union state, and the Union had stepped up for … John Edwards.
I do think it’s time for a fundamental change in the way the Democrats run things. You don’t have to be proud that you’re not smart enough to know how to herd cats.
(Hint: you lead them. With bait, if necessary.)
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
FL and MI delegates will count--they can't not count them--
it would be disenfranchising millions of Americans who actually bothered to come out and vote even tho they weren’t campaigned to or catered to. Big states have to count—the Party would be cutting off its nose to spite its face otherwise.
Caucuses are insane —they really do disenfranchise many who have to work shifts, or even have appts for that specific time of day. It must be all-day primaries.
If it turns out that FL and MI delegates will matter
(and I say that as someone who for the first time got to vote in a Democratic primary where my vote would have mattered, but then I voted by mail for Edwards, sigh) then a compromise might be to hold caucuses for a portion of the delegates.
There won’t be more elections, the states have to pay for those and that’s not going to happen, and the DNC isn’t going to back down and let the election outcomes stand as is, too much pride involved and party discipline and all that, plus the Obama wing would go nuts. Nor will the Clinton wing stand for caucuses alone making the delegate selection, they struggle in those and won’t want to give Obama an edge.
So how about a compromise? Allow the elections to determine half of the delegates, and hold caucuses to select the remainder. Clinton gets a benefit from the elections and Obama gets a benefit from his caucus expertise. What could be more fair than that?