Yesterday, in Kansas & Nebraska, Democrats gathered in caucus sites all over the state to help appoint the next Democrat running for office. In comparison to 2008, when the Kansas caucus was held on a Tuesday evening during snow, the March Kansas caucus was often held outside in warm, sunny weather that made it easier for people to attend.. or not.
Caucus sites aren’t a simple matter of going in and voting, they instead are events that last hours. Some caucus sites took 5-6 hours to complete, as local elected officials and candidates spoke to the crowd while they handled the count.
States like Kansas conduct a caucus for several reasons, but the biggest reason is simple: holding a caucus is cheap, our states are broke, and as a result, this is what you get. The problem is, a caucus held in the modern era really isn’t Democratic.
Yesterday, ~38k Kansas Democrats and newly registered turn out to vote for either Hillary or Bernie. It set records over 2008 (when we had a snow storm). But, how many voted in the Democratic governor’s race in 2014? Paul Davis pulled in 401,100 votes. The 38k Democrats who turned out to caucus on a pretty Saturday? Barely more than turned out to vote for Kenn Umbehr, the Libertarian candidate from 2014, who had 35,206.
This is not to demean Bernie’s win — I’m glad for everyone who worked VERY hard for it, and all of the people I met with and worked with to help them caucus. It was good for all of us. The process, itself, though is terribly broken and we need to seriously rethink the entire thing.
Fixing the caucus system is something we will only talk about when the Democratic nomination is in contest. If Bernie or Hillary assumes the presidency, we will not discuss this again in 2020. But it’s time for us to seriously look at what is happening here — and how we could possibly fix this.
Until states like Kansas and others actually put together the money to pay for a real primary, that is unlikely to happen. So, without a real, traditional primary, how can we improve the caucus process?
The Republicans almost have this figured out. If you noticed in Iowa and elsewhere, the Republican caucus is different. They go in, cast a ballot. The caucus rules apply in regards to thresholds of viability, but otherwise it is a straight vote in many places.
This system can considerably cut the amount of time required to get a caucus done. Asking people to give up 5 or 6 hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon or a Tuesday evening is silly; people have to work, they have to earn money for their family and they have to take care of business that gets done on a weekend. I’m sure more than a few caucus goers in Nebraska and Kansas thought while they were there: “Ugh, so many chores at home are not getting done.. did I remember to leave water & food out for the pets?.. how much is this going to cost me with my babysitter?” That’s the price of a caucus. It is an inconvenient system that favors those who have time to do it..
Quick balloting and an exit is fine. One of the complaints I hear about a quick ballot system is “you will disenfranchise voters who fall below the 15% line and cannot re-caucus for someone else..” how is this any different from voting for a candidate who loses? People are free to vote for a candidate who doesn’t prevail, that happens. That doesn’t, in any way, mean you were disenfranchised, it just means your candidate lost. That’s all. More than one Kansas caucus site changed the rules of the game as the rules were being enacted to allow for basically this; people to just cast a ballot and move on. With thousands of people at a caucus site, it was simply too complicated to even keep track of a complete count all of the time. A quick ballot method solves that. It means you never have tons of recounts and people hanging around and wasting a day.
For Kansas, we must end caucus site by Senate District. Several Kansas caucus sites had more than 2,000 people. More than a few had more than 3,000 attend. How is that possible when only 38,000 voted? Well, it’s possible because there were only 49 sites. Some sites had very few people show up, because the distance to get there and vote was great and people couldn’t leave home to drive 2 hours to a caucus site, stay for 5 hours, drive back, and spend an entire day. Every county should have at least one caucus site; many large counties will have numerous. That’s fine. But we need to avoid caucus sites that require a drive of more than an hour from a voter and caucus sites where more than a few thousand people may hang out. If only 6 people vote in a county, that’s fine. They had an opportunity to get in and get out. But we cannot move to a system where huge swaths of voters are completely disenfranchised because the monetary expense was significant and the time expense was unmanageable.
Quick Balloting allows for ADVANCED VOTING. Democrats in numerous states are trying to push more members to vote absentee, ballot by mail, or advanced ballot. Having a caucus system that makes that impossible goes against our basic idea of urging more people to participate in the process. A quick ballot process makes advanced voting possible. It allows people who cannot easily attend these large events, especially the disabled, access to the system. While all caucus sites were ADA accessible, I know that not all caucus sites had sign language interpreters for the deaf. Not all sites had easy access for the blind. Not all sites could make comfortable members with autism who cannot deal with the crush of thousands of people surrounding them.
This is why we believe in an advanced ballot, early voting, and getting more people involved.
The results of Kansas caucus yesterday are a great sign that there are a lot of people interested. Now, I’m going to ask you: how much better would it have been if more people were able to participate. Could Bernie have run up the score even higher? Would Hillary people have managed to get to the poll?
We will never know now, and the 38k Democrats and newly minted Democrats yesterday will act as the voice for a state where the Secretary of State tells us 408k democrats are out there.
Not Everything is a Treasured Antique. Some of it is just junk. Good friends of mine spend time — maybe too much time — collecting up some antiques. But they know tehre is a difference between an antique and something that is just old junk. The caucus system comes from an era where the idea was to get Democrats together, hear out ideas from other candidates and to allow local and state candidates to meet and shake hands of members of their community. The fact is, for candidates in districts where the drive is long most voters want to vote and go home. In larger districts, there are too many people to make a one on one connection and there isn’t a real discussion about the issues of candidates, just a short back and forth and a vote.
The ideas that made a caucus a party builder 40 years ago are not helping local candidates today. They often force local candidates into terrible positions — if you were a candidate running for local office, would you caucus Hillary/Bernie? And risk alienating even 30, 40, 50 percent of your own base before you even start the election cycle? No.
If we want to improve our Republic, we have to believe in the idea of more input, not less. And for that most basic reason, it is time we commit to this being the last cycle Democrats endorse the traditional caucus system.