Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Continuing on the discussion of politics and primaries: I went to the Republican caucus yesterday as a mild mannered Indian dude, and walked out as a Precinct Committee Officer and a Delegate to the county convention.

Before going into the details, I found the results of the Saturday’s primaries and caucuses pretty interesting. Obama’s strong performance was not surprising, I continue to expect to see him and Hillary stay neck and neck in the race. The Republican events showed that the party really dislikes McCain. Huckabee dominated Kansas, won Louisiana, and may win Washington once the votes are counted. Based on what I saw at the Washington convention, I don’t think most people voted for Huckabee, just against McCain.

Despite what the media is saying, McCain doesn’t have this wrapped up. He needs to get 42% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination and today he got 42%, 26%, and 24% in the three states. Not at all on the pace he needs to be.

The Washington caucus was really interesting. My first impression is that the caucus system is completely broken and full of opportunities to game the system. While I still don’t understand how the whole system works, here’s what I think happens. First at the general precinct level caucus we elect delegates to represent the precinct at the country level. At the county level, we pick and elect delegates to the state convention. And at the state convention you elect national delegates. Those delegates go to the national convention to vote on who will be the party’s candidate. At all the levels it seems like a lot of the delegates are appointed by party officials. They can, of course, pick whoever they want and will usually support the establishment candidate.

So we aren’t actually voting on candidates, we’re voting for representatives. These representatives, in theory, can vote for whoever they would like. That’s why all the media outlets have different delegate counts, no delegate has actually voted yet. They are just bound to candidates. And in most cases there’s nothing completely “binding”. Plus, once we get the national convention, the delegates can do whatever they want if the first ballot doesn’t have a winner with at least 50% of the votes.

The first thing that was interesting about the caucus was the huge attendance. I think there were probably 400 people, while the organizers were expecting at most half of that. The make up of the attendees was old, retired people (including many veterans), party officials, and lots of young people. In fact, I think young people may have made up 50% of the attendees.

Also, there weren’t many minorities, aside from me and maybe two other people, every else was white. I’m curious what the make up of the Democratic convention was, but I imagine in this area most of the minorities are on visas, so they can’t vote anyway.

The Ron Paul campaign clearly instructed supporters not to identify themselves as Ron Paul supporters. There has been a lot of disenfranchisement reported in the caucuses and primaries so far. Around the country, there have been lots of reports of people showing up with a Ron Paul shirt and being forced to use a “provisional ballot” since the officials “couldn’t find” their registration. So, the campaign told supporters to write “undecided” in their presidential preference when signing in, and then, if possible, update their preference when leaving. Based on my experience, most of the “Uncommitted” vote in Washington is really Ron Paul supporters.

Thankfully, I didn’t see that many shenanigans. When everyone was finally checked in, the large group had to elect a “Presiding Officer”. The temporary facilitator opted to do a vote count (”aye”) and despite the two choices getting equal votes, he quickly declared, “The chair is not in doubt…” and claiming victory for a party official. Which was weird, but the Officer didn’t really do anything as far I as could tell.

Then we broke into districts to elect delegates and vote on the party platform. Districts are roughly the size of city blocks. As luck would have it, my district is basically a little more than our apartment complex and I was the only one that showed up from it. So, unsurprisingly, I was nominated for Precinct Committee Officer and won one of the delegate spots for the precinct. Additionally, I got permission from the party officials and approval from my precinct to nominate my wife to be the other delegate from our district. So Crissy is a delegate too.

I filled out the paperwork and the platform questionnaire and was chatting with some people when a guy from KIRO showed up and asked us for opinions. I said something along the lines of, “We have a recession and the economy will only be getting worse. This is due to our foreign policy and runaway spending in Washington. Only one candidate in both parties is addressing these things in an intelligent and logical way, so I’m a Ron Paul guy.” The sound guy didn’t seem too happy with the answer and asked the next guy. He said (roughly), “I came here supporting Huckabee, but after talking to this guy [me], I’m thinking of Paul.” The next two guys said “Ron Paul” as well.

Finally the KIRO guy found a Huckabee supporter and said, “What do you think about all these Paul supporters?” The Huckabee guy looked confused, shrugged, and said “I don’t know. It’s a big tent.”

I chatted with a few more people. It seemed like anyone under 50 was a Paul supporter, new to the party, and this group made up around 40% of the crowd. There were a number of Huckabee guys, but most of them were really “Anyone but McCain”. Lastly, the McCain support was party officials and some veterans who only knew that McCain fought in Vietnam and not much about his platform.

Also of interest, every Ron Paul supporter I talked to said, “I’m never voting for the lesser of two evils again. I’m voting my conscience from now on.” For me, when it comes to voting, I firmly believe that “the lesser of two evils” is still evil.

I just noticed the Washington results; though it has been over a day, only 87% of the precincts have reported and the party declared McCain the winner. But there is only a 242 vote difference between him and Huckabee. And Paul is just 427 votes behind. Definitely seems a little sketchy.