ok, first off, please don't give me shit for this post; i have alot to learn...i'm asking for your help rm...

wtf is a caucus and what would it mean to lead one in my area?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucus

No google HB..i want to know if anyone has any experience with this..thanks anyway

It does help to have the basic knowledge instead of being completely clueless.

i ask because i'm clueless, get it? now, if you have no personal knowledge of a caucus, that's fine..just get out of my thread

hmmm. i thought this was somehow going to be about the iowa caucuses, and i was going to get all excited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucus

we caucus instead of having a primary, and we always have to be first. bah. last year, the caucus was on january 19. this year, it's on the 3rd.

anywho.

what are you being asked to caucus for?

umm...for a certain democratic candidate; there's a meeting to learn about it, and they need someone in my area to rep. i just don't quite get what it is

so you're in Iowa? any predictions? the campaign is having an iowa watch party at some bar; i think i'll go

ah. here, the democratic party caucus is weirdo. you go, get in a group with whoever you support, and then everyone tries to convince you that your choice is wrong. and, if your choice really is wrong, and there aren't enough of you in the group, you have to go get in a different group.

(there's also this whole delegate business. like, if in your precinct, clinton eventually got 60% of the support and obama got 20% and edwards got 20%, they'd each get that percentage of the delegates. then, the delegates from the precincts meet up in the county, and kind of do the same thing all over again and send delegates to the state convention.)

so, if what you're doing is like what we do, you'd be the person who'd try to convince everyone else that your candidate is tops. and, if you do the whole delegate thing, you might get to do that.

if i really strongly supported someone, i'd probably do the representing thing. it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

darrin (merrill) wants to go to the caucus and support ron paul, but he's not registered as a republican. (the republicans have it easier, by the way. they listen to some speeches from supporters of each candidate, and then write a name down on a piece of paper.) i don't know if he's going to wind up going or not. i'm probably not going to go. i'm registered as an independent and, well, i don't like ron paul enough to register as a republican, and i don't like any of the democrats to register in that party. meh.

i don't know who on the democratic side will win. it's kind of looking like a tie between clinton, obama, and edwards. clinton might be slightly ahead, but who knows. huckabee looks like he'll run away with it for the republicans, though. he's pretty far ahead of romney, who is pretty far ahead of everyone else. the funny thing, though, is that on one of the polls i read, they asked a question about how definite your support for your candidate was. 98% of romney people said they were definitely going for him, while only 38% of huckabee people said they're definitely going for him.

however the cards fall, though, it'll be interesting.

aha! very interesting! it does sound like a lot of fun while really getting involved in the whole process is an awesome thing too

Ron Paul, you suck the least, enjoy your minority caucus compliance from me.

Will post here to describe massive fail and Huckabee after it's over.

Although I wouldn't have considered voting for him, I at least had respect for Paul, which is something that I can't claim for any other Republican candidates. Sadly, I saw this today:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007 ... lution.php

All respect was quickly lost. Even though I didn't agree with the guy on policy, he seemed intelligent and in fact I appreciated his often academic handling of the constitution, but this is seriously weak.

It's really quite a remarkably stupid thing to say (putting aside for a moment the fact that saying you don't believe in evolution is a remarkably stupid thing to say). I mean, who does Paul think his supporters are? One thing they are NOT, is bible-thumping subepsilon hicks. Paul was always the anti-Republican Republican. His base is libertarians, isolationists, fiscal conservatives who don't own stock in Halliburton, and other generally conservative folks who are disaffected by the GOP's fellatio on religious ignoramuses.

Any votes that Paul might have picked up by trying to appeal to the brain-dead wing of the Republican party will be FAR outweighed by the votes he's going to lose among the atheist libertarians that form his strongest and most loyal base of support. It's hard to believe, but this is even more retarded than Huckabee's 180 on immigration in the past month. Doesn't he realize that his initial rise in the polls was attributable to his coming off as a caring human being at the November debate, unlike all of the other Republicans who were trying to outsavage each other?

There's not a decent man among them.

My impression was that a Caucus was basically used as a barometer or measuring stick, if you will....the purpose being to really see which candidate had the most support and therefore use this information when the Dem's & Repub's go to nominate their candidate for the Presidency (respectively). Am I way off base here?

Also...if my understanding of this is correct, I seriously question the use of a small state like Iowa and the other one in the Northeast (Delaware?). Seems to me like these wouldn't be all-too-entirely representative of the rest of the country. But what do I know.

I hear this word and I can only picture a bunch of yellow people in a conga line chanting 'caucus caucus caucus' and spilling champagne.

That's not far off, really.

the caucus was silly.

darrin and i both went, and we both had to fill out voter registration forms to register as republicans. they ran out of forms. /:

there were a ton of people there, which i guess they weren't expecting at all. all the candidates had a representative there, and they gave a little speech, and then we all had to vote. there was a big ruckus about how we should go about this, since the "chair of the caucus" didn't have any paper ballots. he was going to go with handraising and counting, which was impossible because there were, like, two hundred people in the room. eventually, someone ripped up some sheets of paper and we wrote a name on it, and turned it in.

it was seriously ridiculous.

in our precinct room, there was no one for guiliani, two people for thompson, a handful for romney, a handful for mccain. the rest was split very evenly between huckabee and paul. unfortunately, the rest of the state didn't go the same way, which bummed us out.

we saw a bit of the democratic caucus, since it was in the same building, and theirs looked like an even bigger clusterfuck. they ran out of rooms to create the groups in the main room, so people were standing around in hallways and such.

now, all i want to do is unregister as a republican. post haste.