I recently attended the Washington State caucus for the Democratic Party, where I was elected to be a Clinton delegate (by way of disclosure). I support Senator Clinton for reasons (not relevant here) more personal than political, and I admit to sharing many of the same doubts and fears about Clinton that many of you here have expressed (I would say the same about Senator Obama). And yesterday Washington State completed its primary for the Democratic presidential nominee (unlike the Republican primary, a non-binding affair, as the Washington Democratic Party selects its delegates exclusively through the caucus system).
This created a unique opportunity to look into the flaws of the caucus as a methodology (and perhaps, the hypocrisy of those Obama supporters who now so avidly extol and/or tout their results). The caucus sucks. They too easily are non-representative, certainly are exclusionary (ours took place over a 3-hour chunk on a Saturday afternoon, eliminating a vast number of retail workers, at the least), inhibit voter turnout and have other significant barriers to entry (my shy Mother would never think of attending, finding the thought itself anxiety producing).
I am sure a lot has been written about the caucus being utilized as a way for party insiders (usually the large majority of the very small minority of those attending) to keep control of the game, and how easy (because of their typically low attendance) it is for a fervent minority (say, of "evangelicals" or "intense" followers of a particular candidate) to hijack the process.
In Washington this year, approximately 250,000 people voted in the Democratic Party caucus. This was approximately 8% of registered voters. By contrast, in a state where registration is easy, voting is by mail, and over an extended period of time, Democratic turnout in the last Washington federal primary was approximately 800,000, or 24% of registered voters, and overall turnout in the primary was approximately 45% (for an election essentially decided). (In a federal general election, turnout in Washington often hits 80% or greater.) Were we writing in a different year, I surmise that most of the readers here would be dismissive of such a system, so I was a bit surprised at the criticism leveled at Senator Clinton (or others, mostly) who, I think, was rightly critical of the caucus as being no way to select a nominee (while, of course, gladly accepting the results of the caucus states she won -- qu'elle surprise). And at the lack of critical analysis as these opiners jumped on the Obama bandwagon or peddled a particular caucus result as indicative of something much more than it really was (of momentum, of popularity). People are surely right when they say that Obama's success in the caucus states says something about his organization (or Clinton's lack thereof), but that might be among the least of what it says.
And now we have a dilemma for all of those "will of the voter" people. Obama received approximately 67% of the caucus vote. So he received two-thirds of the pledged delegates. Yet as it stands now, with approximately 518,831 votes counted (approximately 60% of the total), Obama leads Clinton 50%-47% in the WA Democratic primary. So, with what will likely be over 3 times as many voters, we now know that the "will of the voters" in Washington is something very different from that reflected in the delegate split derived from the caucus. (Figuring out who among the voters in the primary also voted in the caucus (or not) is difficult, but making the best case assumptions for Obama, the tally is still significantly more favorable to Clinton.) Now what's a delegate to do -- flout the larger will of the voters that he or she now knows?
Ah, but the rules of the game, the rules of the game! (At least that's what Obama supporters tend to say when talking about Michigan and Florida (never mind those 1.7 million voters in Florida, many of whom, like my Mother, took their votes very seriously) or elsewhere favorale. Not so much when talking about super-delegates, where the "will of the voter" is the tantamount principle of the moment (but where the rules contemplate that super-delegates can vote how they damn well please, sometimes in contravention of the majority vote. Mind you, one can find instances among all candidates of this selective, self-interested righteousness, but I find it most loudly among the Obama supporters.)
Here's my guess: If Clinton had trounced every other candidate in the caucus states, and the calendar had been set up more favorably, many readers here would have been decrying the results of the caucus as unfair and non-telling (she won only because of her machine politics organization) and the calendar as stacked. We are now making much of this last run of wins by Obama (closing the deal, unstoppable, clear favorite, etc.), as if there is great credit to be had (oh, for the effective management/manipulation of expectations and results), yet as Markos wrote some time earlier (and referenced today), this stretch "is tailor made for Obama." Take states with significant African-American populations. In South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, for example, blacks comprised 55%, 37% and 29% of the Democratic vote, respectively (see the CNN Election Center for all of these and the following data points). African-Americans voted for Obama 78%, 84% and 90%, respectively. A voting bloc this significant and monolithic would be virtually impossible for Clinton to overcome. Based on the vote totals, she would have had to win 85%, 70% and 65%, respectively, of the rest of the vote to win the primary. And yet many wrote of these wins uncritically, pooh-poohing all "Yes, but..." efforts (ineptly by the Clinton campaign, but others less biased, too). And thus was momentum and inevitability made. People love to be in the herd (hence the unfair power of the early, non-representative voting states historically (see Kerry, 2004 and the near-run of the table). African-Americans are clearly voting along racial lines. I might, too, if I were African-American, given this country's history, and the momentous possibility of an Obama presidency, but we really shouldn't be pleased about such stark polarization (while we should be similarly pleased about the apparent willingness of most white voters not to vote along racial lines). This stark disparity likely wasn't in the Clinton (a staunch and reliable advocate for racial equality) calculus, and is a very tough box to get out of (see South Carolina).
The caucus sucks. And we should know better, at least if we want to deserve the credit we so often take for being so engaged and informed in the netroots world.
<