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I must admit to taking more than a bit of pleasure from the charges of irregularities in Washington’s Republican presidential caucus… and our local GOPologists muddled efforts to defend their party’s honor.

I cut my nasty, sharp blogger teeth covering the 2004 gubernatorial election contest, and while I wouldn’t mind sinking them into the pasty white necks of my friends over at (u)SP, they seem to be doing a pretty good job rending their own flesh all by their lonesome. First Eric expresses dismay over the tone of Mike Huckabee’s campaign, and his “scorched earth policy of throwing bare-knuckle punches at a state party and a state party chair.” (Heaven forfend!) And now Pudge dismisses the whole hoohah, arguing that the caucuses were so chaotic and mismanaged that the result “literally means nothing at all.” (Gee, didn’t I read something like that somewhere before?)

Well of course Mike Huckabee (and I’m guessin’ the apostles of Ron Paul) suspect error and/or fraud in Saturday’s caucus… such suspicions are part of the Republican Party’s DNA. Hell, Pudge’s own description of the process is far from reassuring; if this had been a general election in which officials simply called the race for the Democrat with 13% of ballots left uncounted, you can bet dollars to donuts that both he and Eric would be crying foul at the evil Democratic machine. But this wasn’t a general election, it was a caucus, and as such, perception is at least as meaningful as the ultimate delegate allocation. Luke Esser called the election for McCain on Saturday night because that was the headline McCain needed in the papers Sunday morning. Even Pudge understands this, though he clearly fails to understand (or admit) it’s meaning…

This is clear if you understand the process. The results were released just so that the party could make some news. They have no meaning.

Because… um… in politics, making news has no meaning. Uh-huh.

Back in 2004, when talk radio was calling for a revote and the EFF’s Bob Williams was repeatedly demanding that Dean Logan be jailed, I argued that errors occur in every election, and that the error rate in that one was well within the statistical boundaries described in the scholarly literature… an argument to which Stefan responded by accusing me of aiding and abetting a criminal cover up. So forgive my amusement at the sight of Republicans eating their own with accusations of election fraud. And forgive Huckabee for being so suspicious of a Washington state Republican establishment that has proven itself so cavalier and nakedly partisan on issues of election integrity.

Obama wins Maine. And once again his victory appears to be both broad and deep. That’s four for four, heading into Tuesday’s Potomac Primary.

UPDATE:
With 99% of precincts reporting, Obama wins 59.5% to 40.5%. First contest of the weekend in which Clinton came within 20 points, so I guess she’s got the momentum, huh?

As has been widely reported, people are beginning to question the results from yesterday’s Washington state Republican caucus, which WSRP Chair Luke Esser officially called in favor of John McCain by the narrowest of margins. And with official returns remaining frozen at 87.5% of precincts reporting, no wonder conspiracy theories are starting to flourish.

Unlike the Democrats, the WSRP has failed to post county-by-county numbers, and likewise, few county GOP organizations have publicly reported results. But while this frustrates efforts at more in depth analysis, it does raise some questions about the relevance of the numbers already reported.

For example, while statewide results show McCain with a slight lead, results posted in both Cowlitz, Clark and Franklin counties show the putative front runner getting his ass kicked, coming in fourth behind Huckabee, Romney and Paul in various orders, while incomplete results from Pierce County shows a very close race. So where did McCain garner his lead?

The WSRP website only reports percentages, but FOX News reports precinct delegate totals (from where they get their data, hell if I know,) showing McCain with a mere 242 delegate lead over Huckabee, 3,468 to 3,226. Quite clearly, McCain owes his apparent victory to King County, where he relatively thumped Huckabee 1,321 to 798, for a 523 delegate advantage.

Okay… it’s not so unusual for population dense King County to sway a statewide election, but hidden in these numbers is a question nobody else seems to have asked: is a precinct delegate from King County equivalent to a precinct delegate from Cowlitz county in terms of the number of voters they represent, and the influence they have on the final, state delegate allocation? And the answer, apparently, is “No.”

Accord to Rule 2 of the WSRP’s Caucus and Convention Rules:

Each county shall determine for its convention the minimum number of potential delegates provided that each county shall allocate among the precincts a number of potential delegates to be elected which is at least two (2) times the number of precincts in its county. Automatic delegates under Rule 14 shall be in addition to the number of delegates allowed for election under this rule.

What that means is that each county organization is free to allocate as many potential delegates to their county convention as they want, as long as that number is at least twice the number of precincts. This makes the statewide precinct delegate count as reported by the WSRP virtually meaningless, as the relative value of a precinct delegate is simply not comparable from county to county.

One thing we can discern from the numbers though is that Republican turnout does not appear to have been as universally robust as party officials have claimed. So far, the only county party I’ve found to have published their potential delegate allocation was Thurston County, with a potential 624 county convention delegates (not including automatic delegates) apportioned amongst their 299 precincts; how many of these were actually allocated yesterday, we don’t yet know. But in King County we do know that only 4195 delegates were allocated amongst its 2,555 precincts, 915 fewer than the absolute minimum number of potential delegates that would have been made available under party rules. Likewise, Franklin County allocated only 118 delegates amongst its 93 precincts, leaving at a bare minimum, 36% of potential delegates unallocated.

How does this happen? A KCGOP insider explained that at some precincts, no one showed up, while at others, not enough people showed up to fill all the delegate slots; it’s “not unusual at all” he told me. Almost a thousand delegates at least went unallocated for want of caucus goers in King and Franklin counties alone, and possibly many, many more than that — we can’t know for sure until we know the actual number of potential delegates available. That’s not exactly consistent with claims of high voter turnout.

Or maybe, turnout was as heavy as party officials claim, in which case King County might be the first place Huckabee’s lawyers might want to look for missing delegates?

UPDATE:
Chelan County allocated 170 delegates yesterday, exactly double the number of their 85 precincts. FYI, Huckabee beat McCain 25% to 22%.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
The WSRP just updated their results page. McCain leads Huckabee 25.4% to 23.8% with 93.3% of precincts reporting. Or so they say.

UPDATE [Lee]: This Sound Politics public blog post from Friday by Mike McGavick’s former New Media Director, Tim Goddard, gives some insight into the mindset of GOP insiders here over the fact that McCain has so little support from the Republican base. After reading his “Point One” and “Point Two”, it should be abundantly clear why Mike Huckabee is suspicious over what happened yesterday.

It looks like Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s nominee apparent, has managed to squeak out a narrow victory in Washington state’s Republican caucus… but there’s not much for McCain to cheer about in the numbers:

Huckabee	23.7 %
McCain	25.5 %
Paul	20.6 %
Romney	16.5 %
Other	1.1 %
Uncommitted	12.7 %
(87.2% of precincts reporting.)

You’d think just days after McCain’s Super Duper Tuesday victories, the GOP’s putative nominee might be able to secure a tad more than a quarter of the vote in what is, let’s face it, not exactly hillbilly territory, yet he barely even managed to edge out rapture-ready Mike Huckabee. But that’s not the worst of it. 16.5% of WA Republicans caucused for Mitt Romney despite having dropped out of the race, while 21% went for Ron Paul despite, well, him being Ron Paul. And 12.7% of Republican caucus goers — some of the party’s most dedicated and active members — proved so disaffected that they pledged “uncommitted”. Way to rally around your nominee folks.

I know national polls have consistently shown McCain to be the GOP’s most viable candidate, but it’s hard to imagine a Republican victory in November without an enthusiastic base. And with a few points of turnout differential enough to make the difference in close races, down-ticket Republicans should be feeling awfully nervous right about now. (Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you Dave Reichert.)

Even in the Republican caucus it looks like Democrats came out the winner.

The thought popped in to my head as I walked home from a post-caucus meal Pike Place Market with my friend and fellow blogger Carl Ballard…

We heard about the folks who were so depressed over Bush’s victory in ’04, that they threatened to move to Canada. Liberal folks. It got me thinking…

Where will the Republicans go? Will they run away to Brazil or Argentina, like the Nazis did? I can’t think of a country that does for disaffected Republicans what Canada does for depressed Democrats.

Is there a right-wind junta that will shelter them? A fascist father-figure to idolize, much as William F. Buckley idolized Spanish dictator Francisco Franco? Have they no place to call their own when Barack Obama (or HRC) put their hand on the Bible January 20th, 2009?

I’m stumped.

The official results are pouring in and they back up the anecdotal reports from the caucus floor. Barack Obama now leads Hillary Clinton by a 2 to 1 margin, 67% to 32%, with 57% of precincts reporting. Obama’s support isn’t just deep, it is broad, with the Illinois senator leading the delegate count in every county reporting thus far, most by better than 60%.

Meanwhile, similar results are coming out of the Nebraska Democratic caucus, where Obama now leads 67-32 with 74% of precincts reporting. The Clinton camp talked down expectations heading into this weekend’s contests. Good thing too.

But perhaps the bigger news coming out of WA today was the size of the turnout; preliminary projections suggest over 200,000 people caucused with the Democrats today, more than twice the previous record set in 2004. That’s simply amazing, and aside from the complaints from the whiners at Slog, I think it’s a testament to value of the caucus system. Yeah sure, it was hot and messy and crowded and confused and inconvenient and noisy… but that’s the way democracy should be, as opposed to sitting at your kitchen table alone with a Bic and beer, picking the candidate whose ads you disliked the least or whose name you’ve heard the most times.

And on the Republican side… well… I haven’t heard much from the Republican side. With 16% of precincts reporting Huckabee and McCain are neck and neck, with Paul not far behind. No official word yet on turnout, but anecdotal reports cite it as “moderate” at best. Nationwide, Democrats have turned out over Republicans by about a two to one margin; that says a lot about how excited the two parties are about their respective candidates.

Now if only we still had a local liberal talker on the air tonight, instead of just relying on these damn blogs…

UPDATE [7:15PM]:
Obama now leads Clinton 67-31, with 94% of precincts counted. The final in Nebraska was 65-33, and Obama leads now leads in Louisiana 53-39 with 45% reporting. That’s a clean sweep for Obama, and by big margins.

UPDATE [7:35PM]:
With 37.1% of precincts reporting: Huckabee 26.4%, McCain 22.9%, Paul 20.3%. Not surprising from a state GOP that once went for Pat Robertson.

“Sweet baby jeebus, kill me now.”

I think I said those words at about 2:05pm. That is, I said them for the first time at 2:05pm. I said it a lot today, as I recall.

Unlike any of the other blog posts you’ve read about today’s caucus, none of them have my perspective. Sure, they participated in their neighborhood caucus…

But did they run their neighborhood caucus?

No.

I learned a few things:

1.) I really, really, should have gone to the caucus training.

2.) The Labor Temple is stuffy as hell.

3.) “We’ll have plenty of room” is not a phrase I’ll ever use again.

The main hall at the Labor Temple, where everyone congregated before splitting up into small precinct groups, is big. But it is not big enough for all the Democrats who showed up. Not by a long shot.

When my precinct gathered in our assigned meeting area, I found myself sitting at a folding table facing a sixty people. These people had already been kept waiting for some time in another cramped room, so they were getting cranky. What’s more, the script I was given by my legislative district was tough to weed through. Fuck, us Democrats make this shit complicated, and that caucus math? Fuhgitaboutit.

But the folks ended up being really nice people. They were my neighbors, after all! Belltown is home to rich older folks and really poor people who live in public housing. Not many in between. But we’re all Democrats, and we’re all sick to death of the fuckwit in the White House, so together we meet.

People really do care about politics, and Democrats really do love our country. Sticking it out with an ill-prepared dorkwad like myself in a stuffy room for an hour is proof enough.

(My favorite goof-up of the afternoon: I searched for five minutes for the piece of paper that would tell me how many delegates we were going to award, only to find that it’s printed on the outside of the fucking manila envelope they gave me. Ouch.)

As Sandeep Kaushik would say, the “juice” is totally behind the Democrats right now. It’s going to take a whole lot of swift boating to tear down either one of our candidates, so they better start running those “he’s a Muslim” ads and those “she’s a bitch” TV spots right away, since clearly they can’t win this one on the issues.

If I was a Republican, I would be pissing my Dockers right about now.

Just got back from my precinct caucus (37th LD, Precinct 1652.) 3 delegates for Obama, 1 for Clinton. I informally surveyed the other precincts in my location, most of which had more delegates, and 4 to 1 Obama seemed to be the average.

Our caucus location was simply overwhelmed, with every precinct running out of sign-in sheets. 49 people caucused in my precinct, more than twice what I saw in 2004, which had been by far the most crowded caucus I’d ever attended; the chart for calculating delegate apportionment only went up to 25, so we had to do the math to determine the results. It was messy and disorganized — we had to wait for the custodian to open up classrooms because the cafeteria was stuffed to over-flowing — and incorrect instructions were repeatedly delivered… but then democracy is messy, with or without the capital “D”.

More later, but first I want to urge all of you to report in the comment thread on the outcome of your own caucus, Democratic or Republican. Let’s see if we can get a good snapshot of the the results ahead of the official release.

UPDATE:
Geov and Lee and I all decided to post at around the same time, so I bumped my post back to the top, because hell… it’s my goddamn blog. Reports are coming in, and it was uniformly HUGE turnout everywhere, and it looks like a rout for Obama in the making.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
It sure does look like a rout for Obama. Reports are now coming in from Eastern Washington, where Obama also appears to be running strong. 70-percent statewide wouldn’t be surprising.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
It occurred to me that as the whole nation watches the Washington state caucus today, there isn’t a single local talk radio show on the air tonight where we can discuss the results amongst ourselves, anywhere on the local dial.

My fellow bloggers have posted “An Open Letter to 710-KIRO“, asking you to sign on and join them in protesting the cancellation of Seattle’s only local liberal talker… me. I’m told they are approaching their goal of gathering 1000 signatures, but it occurs to me that if you really want to see local progressive talk back on the airwaves somewhere in this market, it might be more symbolic if they gather exactly 1090. I’m just sayin’.

Easily over a thousand people showed up at my North Seattle caucus sites (in the 46th LD), split up between a church and a school near Northgate. Our precinct (46-2280) had 8 delegates, which started out 6 to 2 for Obama and stayed that way after a fairly intense debate between the two sides to woo over the half-dozen or so people who signed in uncommitted. After the first tally, I asked for a clarification on whether or not there were even enough uncommitteds to alter the delegate count, but that failed. For some reason, the precinct captain thought that the uncommitteds would be more interested in trying to convince more people to be uncommitted (so that there would be an uncommitted delegate) than in choosing a side. The uncommitteds were rightfully baffled by this as was everyone else. Anyway, 30 wasted minutes later, the uncommitteds (and maybe one or two others) re-voted and it was still 6 to 2.

In 2004, I went to the caucus and it was a zoo, with far more people than expected. In my precinct alone, over a dozen people showed up.

Today, in my Fremont precinct, 104 people voted.

It was like that in the other half-dozen precincts in our building, too. The turnout was astonishing. Anecdotally, most of the people I talked with had never been to a caucus before. Aside from the neighbor who’s had a Ron Paul yard sign up for nearly a year (I assume he was at the Republican caucus), I’m not sure who could have even been left in our nine-square-block precinct that wasn’t at the Democratic caucus. Apparently it’s been like that all over the city.

At least in Fremont, we overwhelmingly voted for Obama (84 of 104 in our precinct, to 11 for Clinton). In each precinct, Obama was getting four, five, or six delegates to one for Clinton. If that’s at all representative, it’s a landslide of epic proportions for Obama.

One more thing: did anyone else notice that when you went to the wa-democrats.com (as opposed to .org) web site today, as many folks looking for caucus sites undoubtably did, it took you to the web page of the Washington State Republican Party? What kind of shit is that?

SurveyUSA has released a new Washington state primary and caucus poll. The poll was conducted Thursday and Friday, and after Mitt Romney’s surrender.

I take a more detailed look at the poll here, but the take home message is pretty simple. Barak Obama should win big over Hillary Clinton in the caucus today, and probably in Tuesday’s (February 19) beauty contest as well.

Likewise, John McCain should easily win in the caucus as well as in Tuesday’s primary. The more interesting race today will be for second place—Ron Paul doesn’t trail Mike Huckabee by much among those who plan to caucus.

Obama. I think. But I’ll give the Clinton supporters every chance to persuade me.

That’s the great thing about a precinct caucus; it’s one of those rare opportunities for you and your neighbors to get together, roll up your sleeves, and get yourselves elbow deep in the nitty-gritty of American democracy. So get yourself off your butt and head out to your caucus: 1PM today; you can find your caucus location here.

I’ll blog on my experience later this afternoon, and you can hear my preview on Bill Scher’s LiberalOasis Radio Show on WHMP in Northhampton MA.

Those recurring charges:

(This and some sixty other media clips from the past week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)

(Photo courtesy NPI)

Wow. I guess Clay Bennett is right. We really do need a new arena. That is, as long as Barack Obama is playing there, instead of the Sonics.

According to press reports Obama packed Key Arena with as many as 20,000 people, while thousands more were turned away from the door, in what was likely the largest crowd for a political candidate in the 16 years I’ve lived in Seattle. Compare that to the estimated 5,000 people who crowded Pier 30 for a glimpse of Hillary Clinton last night, or the hundreds of enthusiastic Republicans likely to show up at the Westin tonight for John McCain, and you get a good sense of where the excitement lies, at least in our blue corner of the nation. NPI has more here, here and here.

I’m thinking it’s gonna be a big day tomorrow for Obama. How big, could help determine the course of the campaign as pundits and voters fish for a clue as to which way the momentum is swinging after Super Tuesday, and by how much.