Texas Primary - Wow!
Last night Dusty watched the boys so that Brad and I could go to our precinct caucus. I hadn’t voted yet in the primary so we got there a little early, around 6:45, and boy was that a good thing! There were about 400 people there to caucus in the democratic primary! We heard similar stories from all over Austin and the rest of Texas. Our voting location is a retirement community which was unable to accomodate this unexpected number so we had to relocated outside to the parking lot. I was thoroughly impressed with the internet and the incredible amount of communication that caused this unbelievable turnout. My understanding is that the normal number would have been closer to 50-100 people.
Texas has a unique process by allocating a certain number of delegates based on the primary voting and another number based on caucusing. This year there was a huge campaign to communicate the Texas process to the voters to influence the Hillary/Obama outcome. The idea of the Texas process is to give the average person more of a chance to participate in the process. Considering the fact that Brad and I are now delegates to the county caucus at the end of the month, I’d say that it worked! While everyone heard the news and got the emails about attending the caucus, most left immediately after declaring their candidate so we just barely scrapped by with enough people to be delegates. Otherwise it would have all been for nothing, standing there for an hour and a half in the cold in order to sign a piece of paper declaring who your favorite candidate is but with no one to represent that vote at the county caucus to vote for the state delegates. Brad and I paid attention to what was going on and after making sure we’d have a babysitter, we went ahead and volunteered to be delegates and then stuck around to see through the process, not getting home until almost 10 PM.
I’m happy to report that while the Texas primary gave the majority of delegates to Hillary, our county and all of the big city counties were Obama. I’m curious to hear how the caucus numbers will go. I’m excited to be participating in the Big D and the little D processes. Brad and I are looking forward to going to the county convention and having the opportunity to have a say in resolutions as well as the elections. It’s amazing how this bit of a fluke has got us thinking about future participation.
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