My husband and I attended the WA 47th Legislative District caucus today. The 47th LD is sending 38 delegates and 19 alternates to the Congressional District caucus in May.
The whole process took substantially longer than had been predicted, but there were refreshments provided (donations encouraged), and plenty of seating. It got a little warm, but it wasn't too bad. Although the start of registration had been identified as 10am, we got there at 9:30 and they were already registering people. The proceedings were supposed to begin at 10:45 but they still had a lot of delegates to get signed in at that point.
Continued...
After all the delegates and alternates were signed in, it then took a really long time for the credentialing report to be completed. There were a lot of alternates seated as many delegates didn't show up.
The 47th cuts across two Congressional Districts. We're mostly in WA-08 but a little sliver is in WA-09, so the division between the two districts was:
WA-08 34 delegates, 17 alternates
WA-09 4 delegates, 2 alternates
It was something like 12:30 before the first tally was announced. As seems to happen sometimes, the counting was a little strange in the first round. In the initial report, although they said the vote was more than 2-1 for Obama, they only gave Obama 21 delegates in WA-08 to Clinton's 13. In WA-09, Obama got 3 of the 4 delegates.
Before we divided into subcaucuses, we had a few speeches. The Obama speech was given by a state senator (I didn't catch her name). She gave a very good impromptu explanation of why Obama is the right choice. A local Clinton supporter gave the Clinton speech. She was loudly booed when her primary argument for voting for Clinton was that (paraphrasing) "we know what warts she has on her chin" and "we don't know how Obama can be slimed". There were 7 uncommitted delegates (6 in WA-09, 1 in WA-08). One got up and said that they were undecided because they liked both candidates. He suggested that if they could get over the 15% threshhold, we would get an uncommitted delegate who would be essentially the same as a superdelegate. No one laughed, but he didn't convince anyone. :-)
There was then a pause in the proceedings while people who wanted to change their vote did so. I believe five of the undecideds in WA-09 ended up going for Obama, leaving one undecided in each district. It is unlikely this had any real effect on the allocation.
The final allocation was as follows:
WA-08 Delegates: Obama 24, Clinton 10
WA-08 Alternates: Obama 12, Clinton 5
WA-09 Delegates: Obama 3, Clinton 1
WA-09 Alternates: Obama 1, Clinton 1
We decided not to try to be delegates to the Congressional District caucus in May. We left before the voting, a little after 2pm.