In an effort to exhaust Obama supporters and discourage them from participating, Clinton supporters challenged the credentials of thousands of delegates at the State Senate District 23 convention in Dallas, one of Obama's strongholds, delaying the process by nearly ten hours.
After six or so extremely hot, crowded, confusing hours, many of us were unable to determine why, exactly, our credentials had been challenged. The Clinton camp had announced that they were targeting the 23rd district for credentials challenges and, by god, that's what they did. [...]
The protest process was tailor-made for alienating committed voters, wearing them out to the point where they would drop out. By the end of the night, the convention floor was abuzz with tired, pissed-off voters who now hate Hillary with the fire of a thousand suns. [...]
In the end, the Hillary camp did successfully win challenges on 22 delegates. Out of a total of 2,650. When the announcement came, we calculated that the 10-hour delay of the start of our convention averaged roughly a successful challenge only every 30 minutes.
So we stayed. Surprise, Hillary! Not a single delegate OR ALTERNATE left early from my precinct, which meant that the delegation not continuing on to state spent 12 hours making the Texas delegate count official.
I grew up believing in the Democratic Party. My mother, my personal, she-ro growing up was the main provider to me and my siblings on politics, with my father harping in the background.
I am an African-American woman and does the Democratic Party want my vote and the vote of many others like me, who may not look like me but think like me, but who are highly offended by the continued race tinged Hillary Clinton Campaign.
DailyKos diarist mayachay is a 16-year old high school student in Alaska. Last night, she described how, unable to caucus herself, she took the lead in organizing her hometown of Kenai, Alaska, population 46,759:
People keep to themselves quite a bit, and although they do turn out for local elections to some extent, I would have to say, national politics rarely is of popular interest or conversation.
For example, I learned last week that during the last presidential race, 24 people turned out for the Democratic Caucus of our two major towns, Kenai and Soldotna.
She contacted the campaign's state director and received a package of materials to start organizing her neighbors, setting up a first meeting, turning out nineteen people. And that's when things started to take off:
At school now, I carry around a bag of buttons and a roll of Obama stickers. To my great surprise, my peers have been interested in my movement and very responsive. After only two weeks, my school has become plastered in Obama stickers, and many of my classmates wear an Obama button or sticker.
My mother asked me, "Why is it so important to you that Obama wins?" "It's like a revolution," I said. [...]
That's exactly what this campaign has come to mean to me and other young people across America. It is an opportunity for this nation, whose politics we have repeatedly been ashamed of over the last years, to get back in the game before people destroy our country and every country surrounding it.
Republicans will be lucky if they can figure out where to caucus tomorrow. First, as reported in the Reno Gazette-Journal, thousands of Republicans received postcards from the state party with incorrect caucus locations. Then, the state party's web site directed people to he wrong location until it was fixed Wednesday night.
Next, it looks like the party is unclear on its rules, changing its mind a couple times on whether Republicans not on their list tomorrow can sign an affidavit attesting they are appropriately registered with the party.
Half of Carson City's Republicans just had their caucus location moved. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, with all the problems they're having, and with the lack of enthusiasm for the Republican field and the lack of Republican candidates contesting the caucus, they're going to have an embarrassingly low turnout.
UPDATE II: John Edwards has already left Nevada. He got on a plane for Oklahoma yesterday, probably his strongest February 5th state. But I'll guess if he's already left that they're not expecting much to celebrate today.
UPDATE III:Weather forecast for Nevada today: Sunny, relatively warm, high of 48 degrees.
Before we all get carried away watching the results come in from Nevada, I was wondering about a more fundamental question about the nominating process that the Las Vegas Gleaner raised yesterday.
The hope was that bringing the candidates to Nevada would encourage them to talk about issues addressing Western states and Latinos. This never really happened. Unlike in Iowa, where candidates unleashed elaborate ethanol production schemes and brushed up on their knowledge of agricultural issues like hog farming, there was never really an opportunity to do the same in Nevada. Candidates instead came to Nevada with the programs and framed candidacies that had carried them through other states.
No one took up grazing or water rights, the unsustainable growth of Las Vegas (as the Gleaner points out), mining regulations (at least not recently), gambling restrictions, or problems of the Native American community --- or at least there was no real discussion of them. This was in part because Western candidates like Bill Richardson never gained traction here. The party establishment locked in early for Clinton to try to give her a win but may have damaged the process that might have come out of it.
And no one addressed the issues of Latino voters in a real way aside from recording some ads in Spanish. The immigration debate, which had burned so hotly elsewhere, barely came up this week. As the Gleaner points out, there was no discussion of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. He supposes that the immigration failed to come up for lack of disagreement between the candidates.
It may also be due to the fact that Latino voters have yet to exercise their voting rights in a powerful way, yet to vote in proportion to their population --- a trend that today might change, leading them to become a greater voice in political discussions.
The only real exception was Yucca mountain, on which there was no disagreement, despite all of Clinton's attempts to cast doubts on Obama's support from an Illinois nuclear power corporation (while not raising her own similar stated agnosticism about nuclear power). But this wasn't so much a conversation as a tiresome repetition of a talking point.
The Iowa caucus season is now over, but the Obama campaign will be maintaining three field offices in the state: in Iowa City, Des Moines, and Cedar Falls.
Those field offices, open 11 am - 8 pm every weekday and till 5 pm on Saturdays, will continue to provide volunteers with a place to do phonebanking and start to organize weekly canvassing trips to the February 5th primary states of Missouri and Minnesota, reversing the flow of volunteers and keeping alive the tremendous local organization the Obama campaign had developed there.
Much of Iowa's campaign staff has now moved on to other states, specifically targetting Nevada and February 5th caucus states.
Last weekend, tourists in Las Vegas were greeted by the sight of Ron Paul supporters parading down the Strip, chanting:
We’re not just the Internet. We’re flesh and blood.
Could this serve as the motto of the 2008 campaign? The election when online social networks proved that they exist, by out-fundraising traditional party elites, by helping create surging turnout by consituencies long dismissed by party insiders, and by spawning effective grassroots organizing across the country on an unprecendented scale.
Just before the Iowa caucus, the Clinton campaign tried to spin an impending loss in Iowa as the result of illegitimate voting by college students. On the stump, Bill Clinton sounded ominous tones about college students pretending to be Iowan for a day and then voting again in their home state primaries.
The results however were disastrous. Confusion reigned among Clinton campaign volunteers about whether or not they should be encouraging Iowa college students from out of state to caucus.
In the end, the Clinton campaign ended up suppressing no one's vote but their own, losing the Iowa youth vote by 45 percentage points --- 11% to 56% --- in an election where young people tripled to make up 22% of caucus-goers.
Now, on the eve of the Nevada caucus, the Clinton campaign is again betting against voter turnout, making encouraging statements about a lawsuit that would have shut down nine caucus locations and disenfranchised tens of thousands of shifts workers just hours before the caucus --- with little chance to make other plans to participate.
And again, their own campaign seems confused by the mixed messages.
Twenty legislators from both the State Senate and the Kansas House of Representatives jointly endorsed Obama today, including the State Senate minority leader.
This is all the more remarkable given the fact that in conservative Kansas, despite a Democratic governor, the Republican party controls two-thirds of both chambers of the legislature. Indeed there are only a combined total of 47 state representatives and 10 state senators from the Democratic party, so today's endorsement represents a huge portion of the Democratic members of the legislature, indeed over a third.
Kansas will hold its caucus on February 5th and has been heavily targeted by the Obama campaign, which feels it can have the strongest impact with its superior grassroots organizing in the caucus states. After winning the Iowa caucus, Obama's Iowa organizing team fanned out across the country.
I hadn't yet watched this video, which is extraordinary. Bill Clinton got into a verbal tussle with a reporter over the lawsuit, while staffers try to pull him away from the event. Already 125,000 views on YouTube:
On DailyKos, obamamama wrote an emotional diary titled "I Feel Like I'm Going Through A Divorce" that gets at how a lot of us feel about the transformation of Bill Clinton in this race and our sudden estrangement from him. It hasn't been pretty:
The last few weeks have made me see Bill and Hillary as the people that I always swore they were not. It is really, really painful for me, and I feel riven. I'm giving up something that was really important to me, but it's just gone. It went away. So I've taken down the life-sized cardboard cutout of Bill with his saxophone that I've carted to three houses, and I've disposed of the campaign buttons and even the signed photos. I can't explain how it feels.
I feel betrayed and disrespected and taken advantage of. I feel cheated and I feel stupid. These people are almost the cartoon characters of Limbaugh and O'Reilly. I know that's over the top, but so are my emotions right now. They have no shame.
It kind of reminds you of the aging professional athlete who just doesn't realize when his time is up. I wonder if the Clintons undertook one election too many and are risking their legacy by running again.
Regardless, the lawsuit was thrown out today in federal court, leaving decisions about the voting process to the Nevada Democratic party, which set up the at-large caucus locations. The lawsuit would have unceremoniously shut down the voting places just days before the election and left tens of thousands suddenly without a place to vote and little chance to make other plans.
The national DNC has stepped into the dispute over at-large precincts in Nevada, siding with the Culinary Union in favor of allowing casino workers to vote at their workplaces at the special caucus locations set up for them six months ago by the Nevada Democratic party.
Yesterday, the DNC filed a legal brief supporting the side of the Culinary Union and the Nevada Democratic party, arguing that the case has national import for the delegate selection process.
This perhaps shouldn't be seen as all too surprising and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a gesture of support from Howard Dean towards Obama. The defendent in the case is, after all, actually the Nevada Democratic party. In this case, Clinton supporters were actually suing their own state party to close polling places. It's not hard to see how the national party has an interest in stepping in.
The Obama campaign has actually been very successful in some of these voting spats with the Clinton campaign in getting national, impartial organizations involved. In the case of the wrangling over student voters in Iowa, youth vote organizations like Rock the Vote, Young Voter PAC, and Iowa PIRG stepped in. It's been a very successful tactic for them in the past.
In other Nevada news, Jack Carter has endorsed Obama. Carter was the 2006 Democratic nominee for Senate from Nevada, is the son of the former president, and was until now a Biden supporter.
First, they tried everything to discourage students from participating in Iowa. Next, they disparaged same-day registration, an election reform that has led to surging voter participation in the states where it's been enacted. And now, they're involved in suing to ensure that union workers aren't able to caucus.
Nice.
The Nevada Democratic Party, as I wrote about yesterday, decided to set up a series of at-large caucus meetings at nine of the large casinos in Las Vegas, so that workers, a powerful force in Nevada Democratic politics, would be able to participate in the caucus.
The proposal was an admirable attempt to try to enfranchise as many voters as possible. "The at-large precincts are being established because thousands of hotel workers cannot leave work to participate in the midday caucuses in their home precincts."
Employers even agreed to grant the workers the time off to attend the caucus, and no one opposed the decision... until the Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama for president. Then the knives came out.
Many blame Democrats' failure to gain ground in places like Elko for the party's statewide losses. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid has said the Democrats' 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry, would have won the state had he spent more time campaigning outside the urban centers of Reno and Las Vegas. Kerry lost Nevada by 2 percentage points. Source
Democratic candidates for president have started venturing out of Reno and Las Vegas in preparation for Nevada's early caucus currently scheduled for January 19th, five days after Iowa's caucus and three days before New Hampshire's primary. They're starting to show that they'll go just about anywhere to find Democratic caucus voters. This bodes well not just for the caucus but for Democratic general election chances in Nevada.
Clinton and Obama will face off next in Nevada on January 19th. Unlike in Iowa, where the caucus was held on a weeknight, the Nevada caucus will actually be held on a Saturday morning, beginning at 11 am.
There are seventeen hundred precincts in Nevada, of which 70% or one thousand precincts are in Las Vegas, which is in Clark County --- so the city plays an outsized role in winning the caucus. As in Iowa though, since representation is proportional by delegate count instead of popular vote, no one can afford to ignore rural Nevada, hence Obama's network of eleven campaign field offices across the state, including one in Elko, Nevada. The campaign has five offices in the Las Vegas-Henderson area alone.
Many on Obama's Iowa caucus organizing team have already moved to Nevada for the duration, including Iowa state director Paul Tewes. They hope to replicate Obama's phenomenal Iowa GOTC (Get out the Caucus) efforts. The Obama campaign also plans to focus on the six February 5th states that hold caucuses, including Kansas, Alaska, and Minnesota. The caucus format allows Obama's superior grassroots organizing to shine.
Astonishingly, the Obama campaign has already recruits precinct captains in 95% of Nevada precincts and will have the volunteer manpower to contact not just registered Democrats but independents and young people as well.
By now you know how it turned out. Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, getting 2.6% more votes than Obama. It is certainly true that her campaign very successfully mobilized support from women of all ages to deliver a narrow winning margin. But to understand how close the outcome was, consider that Clinton and Obama both took the same number of delegates, 9 each (Edwards won 4). And Obama, with 3 of 5 of the state's superdelegates (Dem officials), has effectively "won" the NH delegate count.
In my opinion, what really happened Tuesday is that a "perfect storm" of expectations-driven behavior, combined with the sympathy generated in the closing days by the debate and Hillary's highly publicized weeping, gave her the narrow win. Obama "lost" the New Hampshire primary to the general expectation of a large win following Iowa. Public opinion polls on the last day before the primary had Obama ahead by 10-13%. This expectation stimulated voter behavior, particularly among Undeclared (independent) cross-over voters and anti-Hillary Democrats, that would probably have been very different if the polls had been able to convey the degree to which the race had narrowed by Tuesday.
This is the last of three diaries about the December 3-9 Iowa volunteer experience of a former diplomat, whose responsibilities included observing and reporting on foreign elections. A regular contributor to One Million Strong, his first Iowa diary described his trip to Iowa and the “fun” of political involvement. The second related a chance encounter with a voter in Riverside, future birthplace of Startrek’s Captain Kirk. In this last diary, he explores what may be Obama’s demographic breakout advantage, one that has not been measured in polls and may not necessarily be restricted to the state of Iowa.
Winter Strikes
Kiana, Illinois volunteer Alex and I went to Washington to help get the new field office for Washington and Louisa counties ready for the “official” opening on Sunday. Many of the details, particularly getting our internet service up and running, were worked out by Jay, a lawyer who had worked in Illinois writing speeches for Michelle Obama before he had recently returned to his hometown of Washington, Iowa. Jay’s presence freed up Kiana to liaise with the local political establishment and organize Obama support in the dozen or so precincts for which she is responsible. Snow fell throughout the day, and we did not know that the road back to Muscatine was considered “secondary” and therefore would not be cleared until morning. The icy winter Iowa weather remained a problem for the rest of my visit, and I can certainly imagine that it could play a very significant role on January 3. However, this evening Kiana contacted a local Obama supporter and, after Alex and I made our calls, I headed to her house to spend the night in her basement.
I'm in Washington, Iowa, southwest of Muscatine, where we are opening a new Obama office to cover Washington and Louisa (pronounced Lu-eye-sah) counties. And this message is being transmitted via free WiFi at the friendly Dodici's coffee shop because we are waiting to have phones and internet installed sometime today.
In addition to making a few calls two nights ago, my work in Washington has been related mostly to the office start-up: scraping the ice off the sidewalk, putting up a coat rack, shelves, and Obama posters, picking up and organizing supplies. Most of all, though, I've enjoyed meeting the steady stream of supporters and volunteers who have stopped by, some to donate office equipment, but mostly to check out the office and/or pick up their coveted tickets to the Obama/Oprah event Saturday night in Cedar Rapids. They are great, enthusiastic Obama supporters who are proud to have the campaign's official presence in their area.
