Seriously crappy caucus attendance

[eridani]

Not sure whether to be bothered or not. From an 11th LD PCO--

Misty,

Our area caucus was embarrassingly poorly attended (17 people for 17 precincts), and we didn't want to photograph a virtually empty room -- sends a negative message.

Next time we do precinct caucuses when a Democratic president is running unopposed, we need to do some outreach to the public to generate interest -- or else just omit them like we did two years ago.

A whole lot of work for almost no return today.

Not a good use of limited party resources.


PCO
11-1597

My reply--

More resources wouldn't have helped this year. The 34th LD organization is about 4x the size of the 11th, and has 4x the budget. The eboard had 10,000 doorhangers printed, and got most of them distributed by PCOs, area coordinators, and other volunteers. There were ads in local newspapers, and the outreach committee leafletted farmers markets and other gathering spots for a number of weekends before today. The donation take was somewhere between $3000 and $3500, not enough to cover the caucus expenses (though pretty good on a per capita basis).

That resulted in 32 people for 22 precincts at Evergreen High (25 delegates, no alternates, no actual elections). The other area coordinators reported equally poor results. Districtwide, there were 247 delegates ad a few alternates, about 10% of the 2008 total.

On the positive side, there were 12 new PCO forms submitted, two from the Evergreen High area.

Maybe in years like this we just need to organize on the basis of more appropriate expectations. I thought the new sign-in method was very effective for keeping track of donations and other information, and the process should be a good trial run for our next "interesting" caucuses in 2016. As far as embarassments go, I think the 2006 precinct caucuses were much worse.

[pnwmom]

1. The caucuses are a seriously crappy system. I was very disappointed

when we decided to make our primary a beauty contest, and keep the caucus system.

I think they should be scrapped. What we saw when we went through the process was eye-opening -- but not in a good way. The candidates that come out of the system aren't representative of the primary electorate as a whole, but just of the few who are willing and able to spend hours in endless discussions and multiple votes on miscellaneous -- and not equally important -- issues.And the volunteers running them often don't know what they are doing. Our group voted strongly for a candidate, but then none of the candidate's supporters was willing/able to go to Olympia for the next step. Then what? I think someone who had voted for another candidate decided to switch her vote. It seemed like a very strange system.

[eridani]

2. Most people who get active in the state party got that way because of caucuses

A primary amounts to just handing the nomination to the candidate with the most money, which buys the name recognition and spreads the content-free sound bites. Just checking the PDC filings would be cheaper. We don't need any more passivity among voters than we already have.

[BanzaiBonnie]

3. It might have been because no one knew it was happening.

I heard not one whit about the caucus taking place Saturday. Not one email about the caucus taking place. I am really disappointed not to have been involved.

Before the Republican event, it was all over the radio and television.