I thought I would draft up a short diary for you interested big city folk. I attended the local eastern Washington caucus at the local high school cafeteria today to support operation hysteria. The caucus is only for the Presidential nomination process--other offices are handled with a "top two" primary. Our Franklin County caucus brought out about 500 people for most of a strongly republican county with about 100k residents. Our precinct had 14 voters--7 Santorum, 4 Paul, 2 uncommitted, and 1 Romney. Statewide totals are supposed to be reported tonight but it is essentially meaningless--as explained below, it is really a straw poll. My guesstimate from applause lines is we will have 300 Santorum, 100 Paul, 80 Romney, and 20 Gingrich.
The caucus selected delegates to a county convention on March 24, our precinct will send 4. The county convention selects state delegates and they decide the 50 delegates for Tampa. The delegates that we selected are not bound to vote according to the precinct results.
Big push at the caucus to circulate petitions to get blocking same sex marriage initiative on the ballot. Lot of support for the initiative in the mostly 50 to 80 crowd. We also got to express views on how strongly we wanted the state republican platform to reflect typical wingnut provisions.
Sun Mar 04, 2012 at 7:57 AM PT: UPDATE--This part of Washington has a fair number of Mormons--we have a temple and several meeting houses. Franklin County is also a tea party area at my table one gentleman had Tea Party business cards. Our local scandal was in Benton County across the River where the organizers had to turn away 1500 voters after letting 2000 into the building.
On the logistics, it was a combined caucus for about 75 precincts. Each precinct had a cafeteria table setting about 8. Some had overflow, some had only one or two folks. After some overall business (elect a chair, etc) each precinct took charge.
Results--Romney 40 percent, Santorum 25 percent