What a DAY!

We did it! We held a caucus and lots of people came! More than twice as many people as 4 yrs ago. Our merry band of volunteers met at 10 am Saturday, after doing 4 hours of set up Friday. We had our signs, our 15 precinct areas, our coffee, our cookies, our buttons and bumper stickers, our name tags, our precinct maps, our microphone and precinct packets. Oh yeah, and our donation jars. At 11:30 we held a pre caucus training session for people who were going to help lead the process. By noon, people started coming in, for the 1:00 caucus. It was SRO by start time. All the coffee was gone, most of the cookies, and all of the pizza meant to sustain us long haul volunteers.

We had our first tally of votes. Then the 'discussions' began. Lively. Yes. Mind changing? Not generally. But it was fun. People sitting and standing with their neighbors, publicly supporting their candidates. Nothing secret. Telling your neighbors why you are voting the way you are. People were nice to your face, even if they didn't agree with you. As it should be. Then came the final tally and the election of delegates. I get to go to the next level for my gal Hill. Thank God we got enough votes to send a couple of delegates from our precinct, which went 3 for the O man, 2 for Hill. Overall the O man won in our county. Incredibly, one of our precinct members said she was voting for Obama because Oprah told her to. I kid you not.

Our county dems were the big winners. We got lots of people participating in the process. AND enough donations to cover our expenses, and then some.

We had fun cleaning up and working on the final tallies. Except for having too many people, it went very smoothly. That's a downside we can live with. Now if we can just convince the State to use the primary votes (mail in) instead of the caucus votes next time. SO many people had family members who had to work, or knew someone who couldn't be there from 1-3 on Saturday afternoon. Many people did not know that their primary vote would not count for anything. Let's be fair next time, folks. I want to see that data comparing the primary split with the caucus split.