This is a report of a particularly dramatic caucus in Texas. I must say that everything went quite smoothly in spite of the chaos and 300 people showing up in a small elementary school cafeteria. This is compared to about 20 people showing up for the Republican caucus, in a red suburban district in Texas. The full story is below the jump.
(Note that this is a repost. In the chaos last night this lasted about five minutes before it scrolled off, and it was not appropriately titled.)
A couple of weeks ago, I volunteered on the Obama website for precinct captain in Texas. I assumed at the time that this was a "participation ribbon" type position, and that little would actually be required. Instead, I was contacted by e-mail with a huge list of people I should call. Later, not having done any of that due to a sort of phone-phobia that I have, I was invited to attend training for precinct captains. I went to the Obama headquarters on a Saturday, and there were about twenty of us there for the training. They talked about the Texas Two-Step and how it was important to attend the caucus to "cast an additional vote" of support for Obama.
I went away from that meeting a little more fired up, but I still couldn't get over my phobia to actually call my neighbors, even though I could sense how powerful that would be versus all the Indian and Robo-calls I was getting myself. This Saturday someone else called me to see if I would go canvassing the neighborhood door to door. I begged off of this too, making an excuse. I told them at the time that I wasn't sure if I would be taking off election day from work to help out at the precinct. I did not.
Finally, today I showed up at the polling place at 6:30, and saw an Obama table (no Hillary table). I talked to the lady there, who had also volunteered as a precinct captain for the same precinct, but she was obviously more involved than me so I deferred to her. Around that time, people started arriving for the caucus, and we talked to the election officials who agreed to let them wait inside, because it was getting cold again. Having arrived early, I was introduced to the party chairs and other folks who had done this before, and volunteered to be of any service I could be.
We went inside and began to set up for the "precinct conventions" as they are called. There were two in the same school cafeteria, and the Republicans were also supposed to hold theirs in the same space. They agreed to move to a separate room, anticipating large numbers on our side. Around 7:30 people were allowed into the cafeteria to begin the conventions. We started by verifying that people at the door had voted in their primaries, and we segregated people out whom we had to look up in the book.
Eventually we got all that sorted out, and people began to sign up for their candidates. The Hillary supporters finished their sign-up quicker (we put all supporters on the same page for convenience), and eventually all the Obama supporters were signed up too. One person in our precinct remained undecided. We did the count, and there were 140 people signed up in all. This was compared with 4 in the previous convention.
We did the math, and 90 were for Obama, 49 for Clinton, 1 undecided. This divided our 18 delegates into 12 for Obama, 6 for Clinton. Then we took roll. As it turned out, three people had left, and the Democratic Party had said that they would be stricken from the rolls if they left. Those three had all singed up as Obama preference. This changed the math, as it turns out, into the fourth decimal place, so that one delegate swung over to Clinton. I had math skills, which caused people to begin to defer to me on these results. I promise I did the math as best I could, but Clinton got the delegate.
We got ready to elect delegates, but then I noticed that the directions talked about having to divide out the number of delegates by the number of people present, which resulted in 8 being required for a caucus. The one undecided had already joined the Obama folks, but I announced that she needed to pick a side, being non-viable. She chose Obama. Wouldn't you know it, I redid the math (being double-checked all along), and the delegate swung back to Obama.
We finished up our business and elected delegates, etc., and then adjourned. The other precinct had split something like 7/6 for Obama. I felt good having been able to help so much just because of having followed politics and read the material about the caucus format. I realized that with one person swinging the delegate vote each way, every one of our votes mattered. If I hadn't been there, a delegate would have gone the other way. My vote counted.