My experience at American Democratic caucus

2/9/2008

Today at 1:30 I attended a Democratic caucus held in a middle school. It was the first time I've seen a caucus in the United States. As people came into the school, they were assigned to classrooms depending on their home address. In the room I was in, there were around 30 people. When people entered the room, they wrote their names, addresses and phone numbers, and their choice for Democratic Presidential nominee on a sign-in sheet. Some people came in and wrote on the sheet that they were uncommitted, and so had not decided on a Presidential nominee.

An older man was organizing the procedure. Everybody in the room was given a chance to speak for a minute to convince people to vote for their favorite candidate, and to discuss issues related to the choice of nominee. Most people, including my husband, actively engaged in the discussion. The most prominent issue was which candidate would have more of a possibility to defeat John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Of course, all the people in the Democratic caucus were critical of the Republican Party because of Republican efforts to cause the Iraq war and damage civil rights.

The main argument for choosing Hillary over Obama was that she has more experience in politics and knows how to negotiate. On the other hand, Obama supporters argued that Obama has a better capacity to appeal to swing voters than Hillary, also Hillary has a large group of opponents that have formed for the last 16 years since she became the first lady of ex-President Bill Clinton. Some also argued that Obama has the ability to make apathetic young people get involved in politics. The choice of swing voters is crucial because Democrats and Republicans tend to have a roughly equal amount of support in American politics.

My husband and I were sitting at a table with a 20-year-old man that was one of my husband’s former students. The man frequently made funny jokes, saying that he did not want to have a cry baby as president, referring to when Hillary was crying in public, he also said that he didn’t want America to turn into a monarchy ruled by a family for a long time. At the end, people in the room got the chance to change their presidential preference after hearing different opinions. The participants who chose uncommitted at the sign-in made their decision. After everyone made their decision, they were split into groups supporting each candidate. Hillary supporters sat at tables on one side of the room, while Obama supporters sat at tables on the other. Seven people sat on the Clinton side, and 23 people sat on the Obama side.

Interestingly, most of the Hillary supporters in the room were senior ladies, whereas the Obama supporters were more varied in age and gender. My husband also supported Obama. After the split-up, it was time to elect our delegates to represent us in the precinct. Based on the ratio of the number of supporters, Hillary supports got 2 delegates, and Obama supporters got 5 delegates. Then pledge sheets and envelops were distributed to asking the participants to donate money to the Democratic Party. The caucus ended around 2:45 p.m. Later, we found out from the television news that Obama received more than twice as many votes than Hillary in Washington State (Obama 67%, Hillary 32%). That was about the same percentage we had in our room. It was a very interesting experience to see how a caucus worked.