Then based on who everyone supports we'll select our four delegates from the people assembled here
Today I participated in the Washington State Democratic Caucuses. This was a pretty interesting experience, and the first time I've even been to a caucus. I thought it was important to go, since this is one of the few times in my life when I'll have the chance to place a meaningful vote in a presidential primary (alas, I ended up not doing so, more on that later.)
My caucus was in an elementary school a few block away so I walked over there. When I arrived I found the school gym was totally packed - and my local state congressman was up in front of the group talking about the process and answering questions for the crowd, without amplification. The first step was to find my precinct. I used to live in a very high density neighborhood, and remember my precinct being very small. It turns out even where I live now my precinct is very small - just two blocks by three blocks. I waded through the crowd to find my group of neighbors.
The way caucuses work here is you group up by precinct and indicate a candidate preference when you sign in, then they do some math to determine how many delegates from that precinct each candidate gets (these are different from the delegates to the national convention, delegates bubble up and get weeded out at intermediate stages.) Then they are required to spend 30 minutes talking about stuff to get people to consider switching, or maybe to pull in undecided voters. After that they take final tallies and pick delegates from the group.
I went into the whole thing in a strange place, because I can't figure out who to support between Clinton and Obama. I really like Obama, but like Clinton's policy proposals more, and have doubts that there is room for consensus with much of the republican party (side note: I watched both democrat and republican debates during the primary season this year, and was astounded by how different the parties are. These differences aren't mild, they're like different bedrock foundations.) I'm skeptical of Obama's claims of ushering in a new era of bipartisanship. My gut tells me that the republicans have been running the show for eight years in the direction they want to go, and things haven't gone well for them. I think the way to get bipartisanship is to start out without it - and take the country in the other direction for a while, potentially kicking and screaming, and then hopefully things will get better and more people will start to get on board. An an historical example, this is how I think of the New Deal.
Anyway, I found my precinct, and signed in as uncommitted to a candidate. After a little waiting around, they did the counts for my precinct and then announced the numbers (to be clear, this was just a group of people huddled around a school cafeteria table scratching things out on paper and using cell phones as calculators - announced may imply too high a level or organization.) There were 33 people there, 22 for Obama, 8 for Clinton, and 3 uncommitted. Our precinct gets four delegates, so that broke down to 3 for Obama and 1 for Clinton.
Then the debate started. I think we were officially supposed to have short speeches by people, but instead we had a bit of a free form debate. It's important to remember the context here: We're 33 people gathered around a cafeteria table in a gym with hundreds of other people in other similar groups, trying to have a debate amongst ourselves. I proved to be quite the contrarian during this debate, challenging most of the points other people made - whether they were for Clinton or Obama. I have plenty of ammunition for these debates, since I've been arguing back and forth with myself about these points for the last month or so.
After we talked for a while, they sent the sign in sheets around to let people change their preference. This kind of bummed me out. I was hoping we'd all go stand in our groups and let people do some good old fashioned convincing. Alas, I should know better, Seattle residents are way to passive aggressive to do that. But the thing that really bummed me out was that even in our ultra-local politics situation, with only 33 voters deciding on four delegates, me changing my vote to one of the candidates wouldn't have made a difference in the delegate count. I kind of wanted to have to take a stand and pick a candidate, but the numbers let me off the hook.
Unsurprisingly, the numbers didn't change at all between the first and second round, which meant that my little six square block area and our 33 democrats who showed up on a Saturday afternoon sent 3 delegates for Obama and 1 for Clinton to the next round, the King County local caucuses. Then they'll bubble up to the state level, and then some of those people will head to the Democratic National Convention in August.
Even if my vote didn't count (at the smallest possible scale, every 8 people represented a delegate) and I wasn't forced to make a real decision, it was pretty cool to be involved in a meaningful presidential primary. It's the first time in my life that's happened, and I may not get another chance to do so for a long time. The good news is I like both Clinton and Obama, and I'll be thrilled to support either one in the general election.
: 2/20/08 12:37 PM
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