I was elected a delegate for Obama in Lyon County, Nevada at my precinct caucus. I attended the country convention today. It wasn't quite as bad as Las Vegas apparently, but it wasn't perfect either...
Please read on for the full report.
The thing that Obama supporters need to know is that Hillary's establishment support in this state runs very, very deep. Nothing in this state has really been fair from the get go. Some things have been, in my opinion, rather unetchical.
The secretary for the Lyon County Democrats came out in support of Hillary Clinton around the middle of last year. She used the private mailing list for our democrat club to announce her "endorsement" of Hillary Clinton and then added all of the people from that list to the Hillary Clinton list. For a while we were all receiving emails from the Clinton campaign and were very upset.
I signed up to be a precinct caucus chair early last year. After deciding to support Hillary she removed me from that position and added a Hillary supporter. When I complained the state party backed her. Even though I had signed up before he did, they said he was more active within the party. In my opinion that was not an appropriate reason. It gave the Clinton campaign a built in bias. By and large, the Obama supporters here are new voters who are new to the process. By saying that it was okay to remove people in favor of more active people they gave the Clinton campaign a huge advantage. They had no problem finding Clinton supporters who were more active than whatever Obama supporters were on the list.
On the day of the precinct caucuses (January 19th) the Clinton supporters had basically taken over. They were very aggressive. As I approached my location a guy standing in front of the door glared at me and said in a threatening way "keep on walking." At 11:30 the Clinton volunteers started to shut the doors. The rules from the party said that anyone in line before noon would be allowed to caucus, but the Clinton campaign sent out instructions (which I saw with my own eyes) with her volunteers to stop registration at 11:30. We ended up in an argument over this but the woman who was overseeing the entire location, who was also wearing a bright yellow Clinton shirt, did nothing to stop them from closing registration. This did not just happen at my precinct, it happened around the state.
Ultimately our county went to Hillary; 46-42 with 11% for Edwards.
Flash forward to today. The county caucus was an unorganized mess. Our delegate designation forms, that we filled out at the precinct caucuses, didn't have a spot to indicate our preference. The campaigns received a master list of delegates with no indication who supported who. The Obama campaign asked me to call people in my county and get their preferences. Unfortunately, I was only able to call through about half that list because of school and other obligations; I was worried. Some other people were contacting alternates and fortunately they were able to get a hold of more people than I was!
After all of the elected delegates had signed in there were 107 of the 159 that were originally elected. It broke 55 - 52 in Clinton's favor. Then the campaign chairs went to work assigning alternates to the vacant spots. Once that was all done the new count was 79 Clinton, 72 Obama and 6 Edwards. This was before alignment, those numbers was just based on registrations.
After the first alignment the numbers were: 76 Clinton, 71 Obama and 8 Edwards. It took around four hours to get to the point where we were able to actually align. By that point some people had left and obviously two people went to the Edwards side.
Well, Edwards needed 15 to be viable so they had to realign. We ended up making a deal with them that if they came to us we would elect two of their people to go to the convention in support of Obama. As a result we picked up seven of the eight Edwards people and Clinton got one.
The final count was: 77 Clinton, 78 Obama.
We split our 54 county delegates straight down the middle; 27 for Obama, 27 for Clinton.
On the Obama side 41 people ran to be a delegate. I am very excited to be one of the 27 delegates that were elected today.
Heaven help me if we have to do this all over again! We were there from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm!
There was drama involved with seating our alternate delegates. Our campaign chair is going to email those details and then I will post an update. Apparently the Clinton chair (who happens to be the person I mentioned above) was making things difficult.
Against adversity we succeeded.
UPDATE: I almost forgot. When we started chanting "Yes we can!" the Clinton supporters started chanting "Hillary, Hillary, Yes we can!" Uh... way to be original guys.