Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

This whole primary and caucus system is really complicated and silly. Take Washington State, we have a primary and a caucus. Which one counts towards delegates? Well, for the Democrats, the primary vote doesn’t affect the delegate allocation. The caucus decides all of them. And since the primary is after the caucus, the primary is completely meaningless.

So for the Democrats, they aren’t being democratic at all. The primary, where real people vote, counts for nothing. Everything is decided by the few party insiders that know about the caucus and can “qualify” (pass all the red tape) to participate.

The Republicans, on the other hand, at least pretend to care about what the people want. 51% of their delegates are determined by the caucus and 49% of their delegates are determined by the primary. But still half of the delegates are awarded by the party insiders.

On top of that, you can see all sorts of wheeling and dealing during these caucuses. Take the West Virginia convention today, after the first round, Romney was beating Huckabee, with McCain and Paul far behind. Since no candidate had the majority, everyone needed to vote again, this time without the lowest placing candidate.

Now, the McCain people realized that they weren’t going to win, so they decided that all that mattered was that Romney didn’t win. So the McCain voters decided to go to Huckabee. The Paul folks also went to Huckabee as they negotiated 3 of the 18 total delegates in exchange.

It was a win-win-win, Huckabee got the win, McCain prevented Romney from winning, and Paul got 3 delegates as opposed to 0. So technically, Paul took second in West Virginia. Poor Romney got outmaneuvered.

The way things are going neither party nomination will be decided before the conventions. So we’ll go to a brokered convention and see all sorts of wheeling and dealing like this.