Tuesday, 24 February 2004

I went to a caucus, and it was okay. It was the Howard Dean campaign in miniature: Last Friday I attended the Democrats Abroad caucus in Sydney, Australia, spoke on behalf of Dean, helped him win a plurality of votes on the first ballot, and then everyone else in the room united behind Kerry. I now have a very good understanding of how Dean lost the Iowa caucus, and of what to do differently next time — but that enlightenment didn't come in time to help win Dean a delegate (or, in this case, a lousy one-fourth of a delegate).

In spite of Australia having the sixth-largest population of Americans living abroad, Americans living in Australia are surprisingly hard to round up for a political meeting. This is partly because many Americans came to Australia in the first place to avoid American politics (Canada wasn't the only place where Vietnam draft-dodgers dodged, y'know), and partly because people speak English in Australia — sort of — and are generally friendly to us foreigners. In other countries you find the Americans clumped together in a walled compound and leaning on each other for mutual support, so it's relatively easy to contact them all and find the ones who are motivated enough to attend a caucus. That's not the case here.

So, Democrats Abroad is pretty thin on the ground in Oz. Nineteen people showed up for the caucus in Sydney; ideally there would have been regional caucuses in Melbourne, Brisbane and so forth that fed their results into the Sydney caucus, but DAA didn't have the resources to organize more than one meeting. Some of the attendees were familiar faces: Dean supporters from the January and February meetups turned out to support their candidate, in spite of the fact that Dean had stopped campaigning the week before. Others were newcomers, at least to me.

The night began with statements from the candidates, who could have either sent a statement or a spokesperson (or both). Wesley Clark had mailed in a statement before he dropped out, and John Kerry had sent his statement as well, so two volunteers read them out on behalf of those candidates. I was introduced as the head of the Dean campaign in Australia (it's amazing what $29.95 will buy you on meetup.com) and made a few remarks on why people should still vote for Dean even though he's not actively campaigning. (Among other points, I noted that Australia wouldn't even be having a caucus if it weren't for the Dean supporters who had volunteered to help, which was true.) Edwards and Kucinich didn't supply a statement, but supporters of theirs got up and said a few words on their behalf.

After that, we held a straw poll — which Dean won:

The poll results were non-binding, but provided a "sense of the room" before we began the actual caucus. Since there were 19 people present, one candidate had to emerge with ten votes in order to win a majority; after nominating our delegates (who each pledged to support a particular candidate at the convention), the first ballot went as follows:

So far, so good. The rules of the caucus called for the candidate with the lowest vote total to be dropped — and in the event of a tie both candidates were dropped, so Edwards and Kucinich went bye-bye.

And then came my moment of zen enlightenment. Because there was only one-fourth of a delegate at stake in this caucus, the rules stipulated there would be no horse-trading or discussions of any kind between rounds: Technically speaking there was nothing to trade, because the fourth of a delegate could not be sub-divided any further. So, we immediately proceeded to a second round of voting, without any additional caucusing:

One person abstained in the second tally, but it didn't matter: Kerry had at least ten, and that was all he needed.

If we'd been able to talk amongst ourselves in between rounds — if I'd had thirty seconds and the ear of the Edwards supporters — I might have been able to talk them into swinging their votes over to Dean. At this stage of the campaign, losing to Dean would have counted as a draw in the race between Kerry and Edwards; once Edwards was no longer in a position to win the caucus, his supporters should have recognized as much, and thrown their support to Dean (just as Edwards and Kucinich supporters joined forces in Iowa to deny Dean any second-round victories there).

And, if I had realized going into the caucus that there would be no horse-trading between rounds of voting, I'd have pointed the situation out to Edwards and Kerry supporters earlier in the meeting, while I was speaking on Dean's behalf. (This is what I get for assuming that a caucus is a caucus, and not reading the actual rules more closely.) A timely reminder to Edwards fans that they should have done the strategic thing, and played for a draw in round two, could have resulted in a win for Dean and helped Edwards's chances by denying Kerry a win.

But that didn't happen, and I suspect that a story like this one played out in several hundred little Iowa hamlets on the evening of their caucuses too. Dean's supporters were high in number but low in experience, and the more seasoned players knew how to work the system to their advantage. (Of course a lot of the blame for Dean's failure to ignite must fall squarely on Dean's shoulders: We all know the media hates a front-runner, and that Dean's populist message was an explicit threat to entrenched power bases everywhere — but we all know that. You can't run a campaign and expect to win without taking those factors into account, and Dean's campaign miscalculated them.)

The end result? I'm now slightly better equipped to participate in a caucus, if that need ever arises again, and I'm in touch with several like-minded people who'd prefer that our next president be a bit more fiscally responsible, slightly more respectful of our allies, free from crippling biases and untested ideologies, less of a wingnut when appointing judges, and so on. If Howard Dean has accomplished nothing else (and I think history will record that Dean accomplished more than we currently give him credit for), then at least he's gotten me off the sidelines.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:44 am. comments.