Adventures in caucusing
My precinct (SEA 43-2040) had about 75 people jammed into an elementary school library that was probably meant to hold about 50 children and one adult. Turnout everywhere has been overwhelming, and there were about a dozen precincts at the school, all in their own rooms such as the gym, cafeteria, art room, and so forth. There was supposed to be one large gathering of all caucus attendees in the cafeteria before the official start, but because turnout was so huge the organizer had to instead dash from room-to-room and address each precinct individually, meaning we were about twenty minutes late in getting started.
My precinct was a fair mix of seniors and thirty-somethings, with a few college kids thrown in to mix things up, but I'd guess the average age was a bimodal distribution centering around 35 and 65. The Obama campaign clearly had larger representation (in all age, gender, and racial distributions) from the number of signs and stickers people arrived with, and when additional stickers were handed around the majority of people sitting around me took them. When we all finally signed in and the first tally was complete, the raw numbers were Obama 50, Clinton 18, Gravel 3, Uncommitted 1. With seven delegates to the district convention at stake, this resulted in five going for Obama and two for Clinton. After the tally, there was a brief speech from one supporter for each candidate (the Gravel supporter luckily acknowledged he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell at getting the nomination, and instead her vote was in protest of something or other that the other two candidates weren't addressing sufficiently...) and after that two additional voters arrived and a two people (including the one uncommitted voter) switched allegiances. I didn't catch the raw numbers for the second tally, but the net result was that from our precinct Obama remained with five delegates and Clinton with two.
At that point we split among the various viable factions and selected our delegates and alternates to go to the various state legislative district conventions in early April, where the numbers will be whittled down further before holding US congressional district conventions where the delegates to the DNC convention in Denver will be selected. I'm attending my LD convention as an Obama delegate, so when that time comes around I'll let you know how it goes...
My precinct was a fair mix of seniors and thirty-somethings, with a few college kids thrown in to mix things up, but I'd guess the average age was a bimodal distribution centering around 35 and 65. The Obama campaign clearly had larger representation (in all age, gender, and racial distributions) from the number of signs and stickers people arrived with, and when additional stickers were handed around the majority of people sitting around me took them. When we all finally signed in and the first tally was complete, the raw numbers were Obama 50, Clinton 18, Gravel 3, Uncommitted 1. With seven delegates to the district convention at stake, this resulted in five going for Obama and two for Clinton. After the tally, there was a brief speech from one supporter for each candidate (the Gravel supporter luckily acknowledged he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell at getting the nomination, and instead her vote was in protest of something or other that the other two candidates weren't addressing sufficiently...) and after that two additional voters arrived and a two people (including the one uncommitted voter) switched allegiances. I didn't catch the raw numbers for the second tally, but the net result was that from our precinct Obama remained with five delegates and Clinton with two.
At that point we split among the various viable factions and selected our delegates and alternates to go to the various state legislative district conventions in early April, where the numbers will be whittled down further before holding US congressional district conventions where the delegates to the DNC convention in Denver will be selected. I'm attending my LD convention as an Obama delegate, so when that time comes around I'll let you know how it goes...
NaNoWriMo 2007
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