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