Caucus Time for the Whole Fam!

If you are looking for Wordless Wednesday, please click here!

If you recall from my previous post, my adopted state of Texas had its primary and caucus last night.

My oh my! what an experience that was! Yesterday we had decided that I would go to the caucus alone, but, as we were talking at supper, we thought, "why can't we bring the kids?" You may want to add "why would we want to bring the kids to a caucus?", but that is another story. So we loaded up the whole family in Otis the van and we were off to the polling place we had visited earlier that morning.

Let's just say they were not prepared for the huge number of people who showed up to caucus....

It was a madhouse! People kept shouting out different (wrong) directions for us to follow. The manager of the retirement home where we met basically kicked us out of the building because of fire codes. The kids were really good though. DadOf3 and I took turns carrying our little Knight. Princess and Prince were really good and stood quietly with us for the most part. (Of course we did encourage (bribe) them with the promise of a treat when we got home if they were good.)

The caucus itself was not even scheduled to start until 7:15. By the time they conquered the the crowd management issues, it was 8:15! An entire hour wasted! They kept saying that they didn't expect as big of a crowd that showed up. But how could they not have expected it? It is not like this was the first caucus of the season. Caucus numbers have been huge ever since IOWA all the way back in January for goodness sake!

Luckily as they herded us outside, we lucked out and got a spot close to the tables where we had to sign our name and choose our candidate. We left around 8:30 but there were still literally hundreds of people waiting to sign.

In my humble opinion, it was absolutely ridiculous to hold a caucus this late in the game. Texas is unique. Its delegates are distributed 2/3 at the primary and 1/3 at the caucus. To vote at the caucus you have to prove that you had already voted at the primary.

If I understand the caucus format correctly, it basically goes like this: a group of people meet; after a set amount of time, the people are counted; if candidates do not have enough people supporting them, the other people try to convince them to come over to their side; in the end, the candidate with the most supporters wins that precinct.

Last night, it was a very poor facsimile of this process. There were only 2 candidates. They were both viable. We all just basically voted and left, not unlike the primary we had ALL attended that morning. I don't understand the point of making us all show up twice.

It was still interesting to see. I wish I would have brought my camera with me. The sheer number of people there was invigorating! It is nice to see people come out to support their candidate.

Maybe that's the point.