A few people had asked this, so I thought I'd try to explain:
Since time immemorial both Washington State parties held caucuses to determine delegates to the national convention. While there may have been some grumbling, it was accepted and that was the way things were.
Then came 1988. Pat Robertson's fundies flooded the GOP caucus and won it. The moderate Republicans who were in control of the state at the time flipped out and believed that they needed to devise a system to prevent these people from every becoming victorious again. So the legislature decided to create a primary election starting in 1992.
The Democrats meanwhile, not being afraid of their base like the Republicans were and still highly supportive of the caucus system, decided to ignore the primary results in 1992 and still elect delegates through the caucus process. In fact, the Washington State Democratic Party has never allocated delegates through a presidential primary.
The 1992 primary was mostly overlooked because the Democrats were ignoring it and Bush was basically unopposed for renomination. In 1996 the Republican primary actually counted for something - not all the delegates, but some of them. In 2000 a repeat occurred of the Republican one kind of counting and the Democratic one being meaningless. For a while there you had the option of taking one of three three ballots - Democrats, Republicans, or Unaffiliated. The results for Unaffiliated were completely meaningless for BOTH parties and I wonder to this day why the we did it.
Then we come to 2004. Bush was of course unopposed for renomination and the Democrats once again weren't going to use the primary results. So the State Legislature canceled the primary because it'd be spending millions of dollars on two elections that quite literally would have no importance whatsoever.
It looked for a while like the 2008 primary was going to be canceled as well, but at the last minute the Republicans said they wanted to allocate half their delegates that way in order to "save the primary" and "prevent Christine Gregoire and her liberal friends in Olympia from taking away your vote" or some bullsh*t like that. So the party thats dedicated to fiscal responsibility and saving taxpayer money is forcing the state and the people of this state to spend million of dollars on an election that is almost meaningless.
So why are people confused? 1) People are douchebags and don't understand that for their entire lives the primary has never counted for Democrats and 2) Our Republican Secretary of State, who to be fair is a pretty good guy whom I support, has been a douchebag on this and has been promoting the primary because he says that it'll be important and more democratic. Both sides are ignoring it however and all it's done is confuse people.
So that's why Washington has a primary and a caucus. Basically blame the Republicans.
