Talk Elections

The political nerd in me has always wanted to see what goes on in presidential caucuses.  Next year is the first election in which I'll be living in a state that has them.  Whereas Democratic caucuses in Nevada are open to unaffiliated voters like me, for obvious reasons they also won't be taking place next year.  Meanwhile, the GOP caucuses are closed, soooo... I've officially switched my registration to Republican.

I need a bath.

I'm kind of curious about attending the caucus here actually since the DFL one won't be notable for even the downballot stuff, though I'd feel dirty having it on file anywhere that I ever voted or attended a Republican caucus and getting on their mailing list. Plus I already sort of know that it'll just be a bunch of Ron Paul nerds anyway.

Ha you know I could attend wearing a band shirt, get high and have my clothes smelling of pot, and talk about Jesus at the caucus, and essentially be myself but still fit in perfectly.

Sign of the impending apocalypse?

Hey, somebody has to represent the 'fake (- and proud of it) Republican' wing of the forum now that King is leaving.

King is leaving?!?!

Also, who will you caucus for?

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=142467.0


Dunno.  Whoever has the most lolworthy campaign by that point.  Which, judging by how things have been going, could pretty much be any of them.

It has to be Ron Paul.  You're in Nevada, how can you not go Ron Paul?  Go the whole 9 yards.  Become the crazy guy in the desert that broadcasts on shortwave radio.

At this point, I'd say the most lolworthy campaign is Johnson's or possibly Santorum's.

Yes he should get high before caucusing too.

It may also be amusing to show up as an undecided voter and force the supporters to try to convince you.

This is what is wrong with American politics.

Great suggestion.

Caucuses are fun! :)  I'm jealous; I have to primary :(

BRTD, definitely go to your DFL caucuses.  You're basically guaranteed a spot at your State Senate caucuses just by being at the precinct caucuses.

You dirty pub whore, you.  My heart is broken. :'(

But your rectum...surprisingly intact.

If he's a pub, he'll find a way to see it doesn't stay that way ;)

I don't know how to feel. It's great to see another Republican especially if the new Republican is Joe but he's been such an asshat recently! Oh well, we'll still welcome him. Caucus for Santorum.

I may do that, but only while wearing a super tight glittery t-shirt with short shorts.

Plus, IIRC you look gay, so that sh**t won't fly ;)

so, on the same day Joe comes out of the closet, he re-registers as a Republican?!

Same thing, really, isn't it?

When exactly did the first part happen, you loveable old psycho?

Paul is like bluechip in the crazy market, so I'd stick with him.

     That reminds me, I should switch to the GOP for the primaries at some point. Can't miss the excitement of an actual primary election. :P

I'd caucus for Rick "The Fighter" Santorum assuming he's in the race after Iowa. Although he's actually one of the more reasonable ones of this group of "candidates."

God bless your sanity, my friend.

Which, if true, says a lot about the Republican field...

I've never stopped and thought about that, but it's true. He's much more reasonable than Bachmann, Cain, and Paul and about even with Perry and Gingrich.

People here have finally seen the light. We forgive you for years of ignorance.

Again, being one of the "sanest" isn't much of an accomplishment this year. Sorry :)

Ron Paul!

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Be sure to switch back after the election.  :)

That would be fun.  If anything, you can challenge them on their points.

Important update:

Earlier this evening I was running across a parking lot to get out of the cold wind and light rain that had just started up, and a random guy yelled something at me that I didn't quite catch.  Without stopping, I turned to him and said "what?" and he repeated, "RON PAUL FOR PRESIDENT!"

With such effective campaign techniques as these, I cannot help but be converted to the rLOVEution.  Ron Paul FTW!

Congratulations, Phil.

Stick it to the man Joe.

Superliminal advertising is notoriously effective (http://youtu.be/-xx4BsBr2fU).

Write in Thad McCotter or Obama or something funny. Jimmy McMillian perhaps?

Yeah, or some other joke of a candidate, like Ron Paul perhaps.

How do you write in a vote at a caucus anyway?

The Buddy Roemer campaign is going to be crushed by your poor decision-making.

Sorry, Joe, but thanks to the previously unknown power of cellphones your services as the fake Republican are no longer needed.

When they call people to move to a certain side of the room or whatever they do, just stay and yell "Thad McCotter".  Ron Paul, joke or not, will likely win anyways ;)

You should back Stephen Colbert.

If people try to tell you that he's just a comedian or something, you should respond that you have no idea what they're talking about.  He seems serious to you.

You know, I have always wondered why he allows his studio audience to laugh at him all the time.

Small world.

I'm not joking (come the March primary).

Vote for Roemer!

I'm bumping this thread to ask for you guys' help.  I plan to go to both parties' caucuses, but I cannot for the life of me find out where or what time the GOP caucuses occur.  (I know the date already.)

I can understand the Democratic Party not directly inviting me to theirs, since I'm not a member of their party, but I know that I can still go if I want to.  I've figured out where my precinct's caucus is being held, and thanks to their website I know that it starts at 11.30am this Saturday.

But despite being a registered Republican, and having given them my email address and phone number, I've heard absolutely nothing from them about what time or where I'm supposed to go.  Google hasn't been much help, nor has their website (http://www.nvgopcaucus.com/).

Any help would be appreciated.  Frankly this lack of available information for voters is disgusting.

If any actual voters turned up, they'd just spoil the party by voting for Ron Paul. Not a good idea.

Would the aliens please take the clone Joe back to their ship and give us our old Joe back :(

Like your counties Republican Party facebook page, and ask them on that page, if you can. Someone will respond.

Voting for Ron Paul, I hope?

Likely nobody at all, thanks to the party's laziness and ineptitude.

Looks like I won't be going to the Dem caucuses.  They require you to same-day register as a Democrat to take part.  Even if I were then to immediately switch back afterwards, the GOP requires you to have been registered with them no later than the 20th, i.e. yesterday.

No big loss though.  I'd have liked to have caucused for Vermin Supreme, but alas.

It looks like there's now a "caucus finder" button on http://www.nvgopcaucus.com/

Though all it does is send you to a form that you can submit, that'll query where your caucus location is.  Does that help?

Yeah, I'd managed to figure it out a few days ago, but that link confirmed it, so thanks. :)  It didn't help either that my precinct number has recently changed.

Out of curiosity, what time does the caucus start in your precinct?  Apparently, some of them start as early as 8am (!!).

8 a.m.  :(

This should make it harder for Ron Paul to win my local precincts, since his supporters don't usually wake up until mid-afternoon.

Who are you going to caucus for?

Alrighty then.

So the night before the caucus was First Friday, which I won't waste time explaining except to say that it was the reason I didn't get home til 2-ish, bed til 4-ish, and and had a stinking hangover today.  I'd had like 3 hours sleep.  Not the best circumstances to be hanging out with a bunch of frustrated old people, but still.  Who the hell decided 8am would be a good start time anyway?  Frustrated old people, possibly.

But okay, so to successfully infiltrate the Republican caucuses, I needed to look the part.  Unfortunately I don't own a navy blue suit jacket or khaki pants, or even a badly designed tie.  I also don't own a polo shirt or khaki shorts, so Plan B failed too.  I do have a couple of plaid shirts though, and if able to wear it unironically, it would suffice.  I also styled my hair as awkwardly as possible, and made sure to wear my least comfortable shoes so that I would seem sufficiently pissed off.  The look was more or less complete.

I got to Rancho High School about 8.10.  This school has kind of a reputation for being a bit ghetto.  I don't know if that's fair or not; I didn't grow up here and am not familiar with its school system.  But judging by the McDonalds bags and other piles of litter everywhere outside the main entrance, I'm not going to immediately jump to this school's defense.  I don't know if it was from the students, or some Republican caucusgoers who were catching a quick bite of breakfast and 'forgot' to clean up.  Given that it was not a school day, I can probably hazard a guess.

There was already a line of people waiting to register.  There was a hold up for some reason, and apparently it's because one of the organizers forgot to bring a laptop or something, so they were having to verify everybody's precinct numbers by hand.  But the hold up wasn't for too long because evidently not as many people as they had expected had shown up.

After registering, people just started milling about because nobody told us where to go next.  Eventually we were directed to the gym to sit on the bleachers and wait.  But after a few minutes we were told to all go to the cafeteria down the hall instead.  Before we got to the cafeteria, we were told to go back to the gym, but we soon found that somebody had locked the doors to the gym, so were told to go back to the cafeteria.  It was rumored later that because the gym had a far larger capacity and so fewer people had turned out than expected, the optics would look pretty bad.  Makes sense.

I should point out that this is only the second presidential caucus the NV GOP has had to do.  I did not know this.

If you haven't tl;dr'd already, I applaud you and am grateful.

Anyway, I found my precinct's cafeteria table.  A guy about 20 years old with a ponytail was already there.  Three guesses who he was going to vote for.  We were then joined by an elderly man with crutches, presumably for gout or something.  Another old man who was kind of jolly and then a middle aged woman who said she was a social worker (and even looked like a probable Democrat too) sat down with us as well.

Looking around the cafeteria I'd say there were about 150 or so people who turned out.  I'm not exactly sure, but I think about 25 precincts were being handled here.  The area around this high school is pretty strongly Democratic, FWIW.

It was still just before 9am, so we were just kind of waiting for more people to show up.  At this point a sketchy looking guy wandered over.  He smelled kinda musty, and some teeth were in absentia.  He was holding a sign for directing people where to go, as it turned out he was one of the organizers.  While he was standing there talking to us, he was casually swinging that sign around, as you would.  The old guy with crutches was right next to him, and told him to stop doing that.  Sketchy Guy said no, because he had every right as an American citizen to stand in that spot, since he wasn't invading anybody's personal space.  Old Guy told him to "get the f[Inks] away from me".  Sketchy said no, so Old Guy literally screamed "F[INKS] YOU" right at him.  Everybody in the cafeteria stopped talking and looked over at our table to see what the hell was going on.  I was now beginning to enjoy this caucus.

Sketchy Guy soon wandered off, but not before defending his behavior by saying that more Americans need to stand up for themselves like he did, or otherwise the Democrats would take away our guns and then where would we be?  Angry Old Guy looked thoroughly pissed off for the rest of the event, and moreso when Sketchy Guy came back because ours was actually his precinct.  Aaawkward.

Ponytail Guy was the caucus leader, so he finally got things under way when it was past 9am and evidently nobody else was showing up.  First item on the agenda was delegate elections.  As there are apparently 199 registered Republicans in our precinct (which I found astonishing as I didn't think there would be 199 registered voters in my [very Democratic, btw] neighborhood), our precinct was entitled to elect four delegates.  Angry Old Guy and Friendly Social Worker Lady didn't even want to do it, so the other four of us (me, Ponytail, Sketchy, and Jolly Old Fart) were elected by default.  The down side is that you have to pay $40 to do so, which is bullsh[Inks].  It's $50 if you pay after Valentines Day for god knows what reason.  What kind of stupid ass system of democracy is this?  Oh yeah, it's a caucus; democracy is not applicable.

What also struck me as odd about this is that we had elected our delegates before we even knew each other's presidential preferences.  So, let's say for argument's sake that all 199 registered Republicans had shown up.  185 of those intended to vote for Ron Paul, and 14 for Mitt Romney, but of course none of this was known by this point.  Let's say that the delegates we elect all happen to be from the Romney camp.  Despite Ron Paul winning our precinct by a massive margin, all four delegates we send to the county convention will likely go on to vote for Mitt Romney.  WT[I]?  Again, democracy is clearly not applicable here.

All right, so anyway, that's over and done with.  There's some procedural dithering, and Jolly Old Fart has wandered off to talk to some other Old Farts that he may or may not know.  Angry Crutches has hobbled off, and although we assumed he went to the bathroom, we never saw him again.  He hadn't even waited for the presidential preference vote, therefore he had entirely wasted his time in showing up.  Not mine, though, as I got half a paragraph's anecdote out of him for you guys.

Meanwhile, Sketchy is educating Ponytail, Social Worker Lady and me about a new kind of technology that will soon be mandated by Obamacare, in which people will have to have microchips embedded under their skin with all their medical history.  You know, like dogs and cats?  According to him, it's already been trialed in the socialist healthcare systems in Europe, so Obama wants to bring it in here too.  As a Ron Paul Republican for the day, I promise to tell all my friends on the internet about this grave threat to our liberty.  So there you go - be warned, you heard it here first.

Eventually, Ponytail is handed some ballots for the presidential preference, which one of the main organizers had just dropped off from party HQ.  They're blue.  They had four little boxes for the candidates, and nowhere to write in anybody else.

This is the awkward part, because until this point, I didn't know how anybody else intended to vote (except Ponytail and Sketchy, who might as well have tattooed the name on their foreheads).  So to break the ice I ask if anybody is undecided, and would like to hear from somebody who isn't.  Jolly Old Fart just goes ahead and announces that he's voting for Ron Paul, and lo and behold so is Social Worker Lady.  Shockingly, so are the other two.  With me going officially full Paultard as well, that makes our precinct 5-0-0-0 for Paul.

I was curious to see how Angry Crutches would have voted, but alas I'll never know.  Judging by his temper, probably Gingrich.  Kindred spirits, and such.

Jolly Old Fart left about forty seconds after casting his ballot, and the rest of us are left listening to Sketchy again.  This time it's his views on illegal immigrants and English as an official language, which I can't relay to you here because (a) it was all far too racist, and (b) I couldn't really follow what he was talking about anyway.  I was rather hoping he'd start discussing fluoride or the Amero or something, but I was to be disappointed.

Incidentally, the cafeteria table next to us had had only one lonely guy sitting there.  He had patiently waited a good half hour or so before signing off his ballot and leaving.  Of course, about two minutes after that, a Filipino mother and son showed up and sat down at the empty table to participate.  Bad luck peeps.  Get an alarm clock next time.

Okay, so anyway the whole shabang had petered out by about 10ish, so we said our goodbyes and left.  I was really thirsty (remember my hangover?) so I stole a bottle of water from the organizers.  I was thrilled to see that it was an Official Clark County Republican Party 2012 Caucus bottle of purified drinking water, which is just about the most patriotic damn bottle of (hopefully) unfluoridated water there is.  I wanted to put my hand over my heart and remember 9/11 with each sip.

In conclusion, caucuses suck, and so does the Nevada Republican Party who took a day and a half to count the same number of votes as the entire population of the 1,056th most populous city in the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Iberia).

And remember, America is right and you're wrong.

And what's my prize?

Yeah, from my experience with the Minnesota caucus, it sounds like they were really doing it wrong at yours.  You should know who the people running for delegate support for president before you vote them in.

Kudos Joe.

Good reading. :)

That's awesome! When's the next stage of being a delegate? Are Paul people coordinating with you about it, or will there just be more chaos?

Also, if you want to advance further and being a Ron Paul hack isn't really doing it for you, you could always plea that "they picked me as a precinct delegate before we voted so I thought I had to support the candidate my precinct did?" 

You coulda just breathed the word. :)

Heh.
Didn't you say that already? Yeah, I think you called it "ghetto".

Lol. This is hilarious. (Just how large is that precinct?)

It is of course entirely possible that this wouldn't have happened if there had been more candidates than available slots.
Everytime I hear slander like that, the scar over my chip implant starts acting up. :(
I want this kind of direct democracy in my country. I think. I mean, talk about every vote being important! (How many delegates does Lonely Guy get to be?)

The reasoning is probably paying the expenses of the state convention. They asked for a donations at both district conventions I've been to but it's never been mandatory. There's the Republicans for you.


Well no because the straw poll results are binding. So that just means the Paulites don't get a say in who the Paul delegates from state would be. Same system we use. Not perfect but still better than a non-binding straw poll caucus.


Well he said this is only the second caucus the NVGOP has done. Minnesota has been doing caucuses since the 60s, so it's not surprising we're a bit more organized.

The delegate thing doesn't matter though as I noted. That was the same case as it was in my precinct in 2008, where we had more delegate positions open than people who volunteered.


Are you familiar with what happened at the Nevada Republican state convention in 2008? LOL. What will probably happen is he'll get a phone call or two from the Paul people reminding him of the convention and possibly even from the other candidates trying to convince him to switch. I got calls from the Senate candidates in 2008 and Gubernatorial ones in 2010 even though I was clearly known as a Rybak supporter. Of course for the Senate and Gubernatorial endorsement votes they mattered, the Nevada GOP presidential delegate counts are already set in stone.


As noted above, that happened at both caucuses I've participated in, but both times we were selecting a massive amount of delegates, around 40-50. Probably a result of the formula being based on how many votes DFL candidates get but in this area there being a ton of DFL voters who aren't likely to participate in a caucus. Not surprising.

Great story!

If it's any consolation, caucuses aren't the only contests with totally ridiculous delegate rules. In PA, we directly elect our delegates (with a meaningless beauty pagent primary also on the ballot) and the candidates for delegate do not have for whom they are pledged next to their name. Good thing I'm involved so I know to whom each delegate candidate is pledged. Informing the public will be a difficult task since our primary hasn't meant anything in decades and the machines always dominated the delegate selection with only minor or no opposition. It will surely be a headache when April 24th rolls around.

PHOTOS!


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The guy in the right of the frame wearing the off-white hat is Sketchy Guy from my special report.


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What's this?  A black fellow?  You're in the wrong caucus, friend!

Note the three (3) bespectacled men with white goatees, too.  No reason, just note them.


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Caucusgoers be caucusin'

The county convention is next month at the Orleans Hotel.  To be honest though I'm not convinced I want to follow through with it because 40 bucks is 40 bucks, you know?  I don't make political donations at the best of times.

And no, I've heard nothing from the Paul mainframe.  But then they still don't have any of my contact info (thankfully).

Says who?  I know the point was moot in our precinct, but who could stop the precinct delegates from voting for whoever they want at the county convention and beyond?  Nobody told us anything was binding at the point of electing delegates, which again, took place before we even knew who each other was planning to vote for.

Looks almost like Alfonzo Rachel.