A Cause to Caucus For

I'm watching the results slowly come in in my home state of Texas. While it has been called for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama could still get more delegates out of the state. It could be some time before we know what will happen there, but I know what happened in my county.

Hillary Clinton won the county 63% to 35%. A total of 4761 people in my county voted in the Democratic Primary. In the Republican Primary, a total of 7146 people voted.

100% of precincts in both have reported.

The numbers should give you some idea of what type of county I live in. It is small (comparitively) and strongly conservative. I have no doubt that there were a lot of Republicans crossing party lines to vote in the Democratic primary, and I have no doubt that a majority of them were voting for Hillary Clinton. But I also believe that there are far more Democrats in my county then people first assumed.

When I headed to my precinct in order to caucus (part two of the Texas Two Step) there were no parking places whatsoever. It was just before 7:00 when the polls were scheduled to close. Surely, I thought, this isn't just people waiting to vote?

As I parked, far away from where I was supposed to be, I saw in the distance lots of people hanging around outside. I walked up to them, trying to figure out exactly where I was supposed to be and who all these people were. As I listened to some of the conversation (and entered it occasionally) I realized that a lot of these people were Democrats.

There was still a long line inside the building containing our precinct of people trying to vote. We were told that we were not allowed inside until the voting finished. No one complained about this, I think we all understood it. The problem was that I don't think any of us were anticipating the fact that we would have to wait outside for quite some time and hadn't planned accordingly. It was a little cold. As we stood shivering looking 100 feet away at the building where people were voting we tried to tell from what we could see through the windows how many more people still had to vote.

Apparently, the precinct judge was worried about the large number of people standing outside. She called for some police help describing our shivering masses as a "angry mob".

The cop showed up and walked past us to the precinct where the door was unlocked and he was let in. We continued to shiver and talk amongst ourselves. A few minutes later he walked back outside. This was at 7:30. He came up very close to where I was standing and addressed us. He said that the precinct judge wanted us to make sure we were beyond the sign a full 100 feet from the doors. There was one person just on the precinct side of the sign. She quickly took the one step necessary to comply with the rules.

The cop said he hoped we would stay orderly as there were a lot more of us then there was of him. He said it should be fine as long as we didn't have pitchforks. I then responded that it might be helpful if we had some torches, just for warming purposes. I got a large laugh from that.

Finally, the last people finished voting. We still had to wait as they packed away the voting apparatus. Finally, the precinct judge called for the Democratic Precint Chair. She walked up the sidewalk and into the building. About a minute later, the precinct judge came back out and called for the Republican Precinct Chair. About a minute after that, the man who was the Republican Precinct Chair came back out and asked who all was there for the Republican Precinct Convention. Three of the nearly 100 people standing outside stepped forward. Everyone else there was there for the Democratic caucus. I was shocked. I didn't think there were that many Democrats in my county.

Finally, the rest of us were let inside at about 7:45. We were told that we had two small rooms, probably about 12 feet by 10 feet each, to hold nearly 100 people. Then we were told that there were only 5 sheets for us to sign with 12 spots on each one. That meant that there were only 60 slots for us and 30 some more people wanting to caucus. The precinct chair had to call the "hotline" in order to find out what to do about it. A majority of the people went into the room on the left (fitting I suppose since we're Democrats) but I and a few others went into the room on the right. Three of the sheets went into the room on the left, the other two went into the room I was in. I signed third on one of them, stating my preference for Barack Obama. Many people weren't exactly sure what it was we were doing, so I tried my best to answer the questions that people had. They seemed to understand as I did my best to explain the caucus process. Finally, the precinct chair recieved word that she could use notebook paper for those who couldn't fill out the official sheets. Meanwhile, a woman in the room I was in decided that we should split those who had already filled in the sheets into rooms based on their vote. Our room became the Barack Obama room.

As more and more people came into our room after filling out sheets, I found I was explaining what exactly it was we were doing to more and more people. I explained that they would count all of the votes on the sheets for Barack Obama and the votes for Hillary Clinton, and based on those percentages, the delegates would be split up for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then we would decide who among us would serve as those delegates in the county convention on March 29th.

Apparently people felt like I knew what I was talking about. When it came time for the precinct chair to be voted upon, I actually recieved a nomination causing us to vote between me and the woman who came in as the precinct chair. She won, which I wasn't really upset about, because even though I knew what was going on and what needed to be done, I didn't come in planning to run the caucus.

The next step was for the Precinct Chair to make sure that everyone who caucused had voted and were therefore able to caucus. As we waited for that news. Those of us in the Obama room talked amongst ourselves. I talked a little about why I was a Barack Obama supporter, plus thanks to my internet enabled phone was able to fill people in on what was happening nationally.

There were more people in the Obama room then in the Clinton room, but fully a third of the people who had signed the sheets had left at this point, as they had no desire to serve as delegates, but wanted to vote in the caucus.

Finally, everyone was deemed eligable for the caucus and the Precinct Chair and the Secretary (who we also voted on and who thankfully no one nominated me for) counted up the votes and did the math to split up the 14 delegates available to our precinct.

Although I didn't know it then, the caucus vote in our precinct very closely matched the primary vote in our county. 61% of the vote went for Clinton, 39% went for Obama, meaning 9 of the delegates would be Clinton delegates and 5 would be Obama delegates.

At this point I began to worry about whether I would be able to be a delegate to the county convention, which I really wanted to be. As I said, the majority of people still there were in the Barack Obama room, whereas in the Clinton room, there was just enough people to have the requisite number of delegates and alternates required.

Luckily, I had done a good job of making my presence known and my desire to be a delegate, and I was chosen as one of the five delegates for Barack Obama.

After it was decided, I got a chance to shake hands with most of the Obama supporters, as well as say "See you soon" to the other delegates. I went to speak to the Precinct Chair, who didn't seem at all upset that I was nominated to replace her earlier in the evening. Instead she invited me to the Democratic offices of the county telling me that young democrats such as myself were few and far between in the area and should get involved. I told her that I would be more then happy to do just that. We talked about how pleased we both were to see the turnout that the precinct recieved considering what a conservative strong hold out county was, and hoped that such enthusiasm could continue past the primary and even past the Presidential election in November.

Needless to say, I am very excited about the opportunity to serve as a precinct delegate for Senator Obama, and even more excited about the fact that I was wrong to believe that I was alone as a Democrat in my county and in fact there are far more of us then I could have hoped.

Nearly 100 people caucused at my precinct alone, a small precinct in a small county, a county that is largly conservative, and still almost 100 people came out on a cold night after having previously voted either earlier in the day or in the last couple of weeks, almost 100 people waited in the cold for 45 minutes, then waited to sign their names to paper that was quickly running out. Then half of those people waited to decide on who would represent their precinct in the county convention. The dedication of those people gave me hope. Even though the percentage of delegates didn't go the way I wanted it to, it gave me hope that the people of the Country are ready to make their voice heard, that maybe the government will once again be of the people and for the people.

Change starts from the bottom up.

Yes We Can.