Woke up this morning and went across the street to today’s Democratic Caucus for my precinct at the Town Hall. At first Town Hall looked oddly quiet, but after Prairie (coming along as an observer) and I saw the signs on the front door telling us to go downstairs, we walked into a room packed practically wall-to-wall with caucusgoers, and figured we were in in the right place after all.
Overall, it was in interesting, if somewhat confusing experience. There were probably around fifteen different precincts all gathering in the same room, and from what the moderator of the whole thing was saying, apparently there was a far greater turnout than had been expected — I’d estimate that there were around 300-400 people there. While this is a great thing to see (in some ways, I’m actually more interested in the final turnout numbers from all the various caucuses and primaries than I am in who actually gets the nomination), it did make for a fairly crowded and noisy process.
My particular precinct had twenty-four people show up, split roughly 2/3 for Kerry and 1/3 for Dean, which ended up being the final delegate split (two delegates for Kerry and one for Dean). I’m expecting that that was probably the rough result for the rest of the precincts in the room — as Prairie and I were looking around, we guessed that the average age was somewhere in the mid-40’s or so, with most of the younger people and senior citizens supporting Dean, and the majority of the 35-50 year old attendees supporting Kerry. There were, of course, assorted Edwards and Kucinich supporters visible, but I didn’t see much evidence of support for any of the other candidates.
I was somewhat amused by the moderator, though. During his “here’s what’s going on and how we’re going to do it” speech and Q-and-A session, he occasionally had to cite examples of what would be done if one candidate didn’t have enough support to gain any delegates. When he’d give an example, he’d semi-randomly choose candidate’s names for the situation, and I noticed that Dean was used as an example most often. Kerry, Kucinich, and Lieberman were also used, but neither Clark nor Edwards made an appearance at all. Some (un?)intentional editorializing, perhaps? I doubt it really made that much of a difference, if any, but it was enough to catch my ear.
We didn’t stick around enough to see if any final numbers from all the gathered precincts were announced. While we’d originally planned to do just that, our precinct was one of the first to finish the process and select delegates, and then they moved on to proposing resolutions to be supported. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, of course, and it’s part of the process, but when we noticed that the conversation at the table had suddenly moved to debating the wall between Palestine and Israel, we decided we’d go ahead and duck out and just get the final results off the web later in the day. I don’t know much about that particular issue, but I know enough to know that it tends to get very heated very quickly, and it seemed to us to be a good time to leave.
And that was that. I cast my vote for Dean, and helped him get one more delegate for the next round in May. I’ll keep an eye on the results as they come in to see where things ended up statewide over the course of the day.
iTunes: “Skinthieves” by Moodswings from the album Moodfood (1992, 6:08).