The 2008 presidential field at-a-glance

[PeppyGPhiB]

I attended a Democratic caucus in Washington this weekend, and I'd just like to say that it was truly inspiring to see SO MANY people that passionate about an election in this country. There were so many cars that I had to park about a mile away from the junior high school where my local caucus was held, and once I got to the school, there was probably 1,000 people crammed into the tiny gym and school library. My precinct, and a few others, had to go outside to conduct our business because it was simply too loud and crowded inside. The organizers were in no way expecting such a record crowd, but all agreed it was a GOOD problem to have this time.

For the person who asked about the voting that takes place at caucuses, yes, there is voting but not necessarily consensus. At my caucus, when we first got there, we signed in with our precinct, listing a preliminary candidate preference on the sign-in sheet. After a lot of reading of the rules, a person assigned to record the votes used a formula to determine the breakdown of delegates proportional to the votes casted for each candidate on the sign-in sheet. In the case of my precinct, we had 8 delegates to be assigned, and preliminary votes gave Obama 6 of those delegates and Clinton 2. We also had two people that were undecided, however they were mathematically unviable compared to Obama and Clinton. So, the Obama and Clinton groups each selected one representative from their side to speak for one minute about their candidate, trying to woo the undecideds and other candidate supporters. Then we had a few minutes of mingling with each other, after which the chair asked if anyone would like to switch sides - in our case, the two undecideds decided to move to the Clinton camp, and a couple of Obama people switched to Clinton, too. Then they re-tallied the votes at that point and used the formula again to determine how many delegates each candidate now had. It ended up being Obama=5, Clinton=3. Then the chair asked for volunteers from each side to be their respective candidates' delegates to the next convention. The end.