Overwhelmingly Obama at the North Seattle Democratic Caucus - Thornton Creek School

So I just got back from my first Democratic Caucus. What a fascinating process. When you think of the word “grass-roots”, it’s really happening. You and your neighbors getting together to discuss the candidates and attempting to woo undecided voters to your camp. The turnout at the Thornton Creek School Caucus was insane. People were standing in the hallways until we broke out to into our individual precinct sessions.

Check the photos. The first one is the main gathering area and the second one is in my precinct caucus:

Our particular caucus was civil, but I could easily see how these things could turn heated. Did any of you have crazy experiences out caucusing? If so, please leave them in the comments.

So how do these things work? When you arrive at the caucus, you find a table for your precinct number (people can help you find this if you don’t know) and sign-in with your candidate selection. You can also mark “undecided” if that’s the case for you. Everyone gathers in one gigantic room to hear some basic directions and then you break out into smaller groups with your neighbors to do an initial vote tally. Due to the vagaries (and rounding of numbers) in the caucus process, this translated initially to 4 Obama delegates, 1 Clinton, and 1 undecided. Each of our three groups got together to pick a representative to make the case for their candidate to the other camps.

In our little breakout session, we came up with the following bullet points that we wanted to get across to the other groups:

1. Inspirational leadership. Yes, we can. Uniter
2. Community Organizer vs. Corporate Attorney
3. Charismatic and persuasive.
4. Hillary polarizes. Might not be able to move on big things effectively
5. The foreign perception stands to be improved by electing Barack Hussein Obama
6. Barack more palatable to Republicans. Better battle for McCain
7. May get larger share of the Edwards delegates

At the end of this, we took a 10 minute break, probably the most interesting part of the whole process. At that point, the most outspoken people in each camp descend upon the undecided voters and try to convince them to vote for their candidate. After the break, anyone can go up and change their vote. In a room of 77 people, about 5 people went and changed on ours (mostly from the “undecided” camp of about 11 or 12 people). After the switch, there’s a final tally. In our case (district 46-2302), here was the count:

• Obama: 56
• Clinton: 14
• Undecided: 7

After all was said and done, our delegate count was unaltered. Each group then gathered to vote on who to send as their delegate to the next phase. In future years, I’d like to try that out. This time, I really just enjoyed seeing the turnout, meeting my neighbors, and learning a bit about the process. I’d recommend it to everyone. It’s our strongest chance for change.