A(nother) day at the caucuses
Back on February 9, I went to the Democratic caucus in Washington state. Caucuses are actually multi-stage processes. At the precinct caucus level, which was what we did on February 9, voters get together and select delegates to the next level. This next level is either the legislative district caucus or (for sparsely populated rural areas) the county convention. Legislative district caucuses in the most populated areas of the state were today and county conventions in other areas will occur over the next couple of weeks.
On February 9, I was elected as a delegate for Obama and today I went to the legislative district caucus. The process there is basically the same as at the precinct caucus. First, everybody signs in with their vote for the presidential candidate they prefer. An initial tally is done to see how many votes there are for each candidate (it is also possible to vote Uncommitted). Each preference group must have at least 15% of the vote to earn delegates. Since the Uncommitted group is usually less than 15% and there may be some candidates that got less than 15%, these people have a chance to change their vote. Other people can change their vote as well but generally do not.
The delegates up for grabs will go to the next level, which is the congressional district caucus. To make things even more complicated, my legislative district has a small region that is in a different congressional district than the rest of it.
So what we did is that after everybody had made their final choice, the votes were tallied up for Obama and Clinton in each congressional district group and delegates allocated in proportion to the share of the vote.
Most of my legislative district is in the 8th Congressional District, and a total of 34 delegates were up for grabs here. The allocation was 24 delegates for Obama (70.6%) and 10 delegates for Clinton (29.4%). The part of the legislative district that is in the 9th Congressional District had 4 delegates assigned to it. These went 3 for Obama (75%) and 1 for Clinton (25%).
Overall, there were some 654 voters present as precinct caucus delegates. Some of these had originally been elected as delegates, while others had been elected as alternates and were seated because the original delegates could not make it. Altogether, I would estimate that there were around 800 people that turned up, both delegates and alternates. This is out of some 1,000 people eligible to there. This is an astonishing turnout! I was at the legislative district caucus in 2004 and it was nothing like this!
Anyway, a long day and tiring (and complicated to explain, so props to anybody that got this far) but worth it. The crowd was very diverse, with a much higher African-American turnout than usual, and most of us were fired up and ready to go for Obama!
Late update, Sunday morning
A few other highlights of the day:
- One of the would-be delegates sang a song about Obama as her "speech" asking people to vote for her (each delegate candidate got 1 minute to speak)
- All three of our district's state legislators were there. Our state senator gave a speech for Obama during the part where people could change their vote
- Unfortunately, the Clinton supporter who was speaking chose to argue that people should not vote for Obama because "we don't know what the right wing may slime him with", which was greeted with boos and some heckling. It's really not a good idea to try negative campaigning in front of your own friends and neighbors!
- One guy was so committed to being Uncommitted that he wanted to convince others to switch to Uncommitted too. Actually he gave a pretty good speech about how he felt that both candidates were good
- The chair of the district Democratic party served as the chair of the event and did a great job as a neutral leader, but his sympathies became clear when he stayed around to lead the Obama 8th Congressional District sub-caucus (pictured, top) and led us in a chant of "Yes we can". I love this campaign!
