| Original Message |
Kathryn (no login)
Posted Jan 20, 2004 7:07 AM
The caucuses serve two important roles. The first is to choose a candidate; the second is to set the party platform. That second part is arcane and hard to report and hard to sell in headlines, so it doesn't really get any press coverage -- everything's all about the candidate.
Every state has a caucus for every political party. You're only hearing about the Dems this year because Bush is the candidate-apparent for the GOP, and nobody viable is running in any of the third parties. Iowa's caucus gets so much attention because it's the first one; there's really no other reason. It's the first time there are any cold hard facts about who's likely to be the Presidential candidate instead of just a bunch of phone polls.
OK this next part gets a little hard to follow, so stay with me.
Each state gets a certain number of delegates, which are the folks who actually vote for the candidate of their choice. It's based on population, so California has like a zillion, while Wyoming has, like. . .. two. OK more than two. But this isn't a majority rules election, where the most popular guy gets all the votes; it's what's called proportional representation, where if 30% of your state's population likes candidate X, then 30% of your delegates will be for candidate X.
The way they sort this out is that in every voting precinct, everyone who cares gets together and splits up into groups depending on who they like. Then they figure out what percentage is for who, and choose their delegates as a result. (The delegates btw are real people who just happened to show up that day and are willing to go on to the next convention. They aren't like special politics people.) There's an additional confusing thing where a candidate has to have at least 15% in order to get any delegates at all, too. If someone gets less than 15% of the vote in any given precinct, than all of his delegates have to decide who they like second best and go throw their lot in with that guy.
At the end of the primary, the guy with the most number of delegates NATIONWIDE is the guy who gets to be the presidential candidate. So it's possible, by some unlikely math, for the guy who comes in second everywhere to be the candidate. All of you should go to your caucus; it's free, and it's fun, and it gets you involved in politics at a grass-roots level. Even if you're not picking a candidate because you're a Republican or whatever, you still get to say your piece about what should be in the party platform, and that's always good. |
|
|