Shall We Caucus?

I will bet you wish you knew someone who took part in the Iowa caucus. They have still not announced the results and it is about 16 hours later.

You do know someone. I was there. In my small town we had exactly 21 people taking part in the Democratic caucus.

I felt it was not run as efficiently as I would have liked. I like a little more order than I saw there. This is only my observation and not meant to cast aspersions on the process.

The doors were closed at precisely 7:00 PM as instructed by the rules.  A cover letter was read that explained what we were going to do.

There were local representatives for 3 of the candidates. Since they were residents of our town they would also be voting.

Each representative spoke to the reasons we should vote for their candidate. If someone wished to speak about a candidate who did not have an official representative we were welcome. Two of us did.

Then we were given a card and a pen so we could write the name of the candidate we were voting for. We then were grouped by candidate.

The groups were Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Tom Steyers, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. That was it.

In order to be "viable" and move on to the next level a candidate had to have at least 15% of the total of votes attending. Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer were eliminated and their supporters chose other candidates.

In the end Pete Buttigieg had the most supporters. To close the caucus a delegate was chosen to go to the county level and represent the top candidate from our precinct.

So that was the result in my precinct. I have no idea yet what happened in the rest of the state.

I normally keep my political beliefs to myself because I choose not to share them. I will share that my candidate was viable but did not come out on top. I hope he did well in the state. I also hope that people will vote in their primaries too.