Nebraska primary

Here are the primary results so far, with 86% in:

Obama: 46,297 49%
Clinton: 43,640 47%

Obama net win: 2%, 2,657 votes

Here were the results for the caucus (note that these are actual vote totals, NOT state delegates, despite what a few sites say):

Obama: 26,126 67.7%
Clinton: 12,445 32.3%

Obama net win: 35.4%, 13,681

If Obama loses in November (I'm not saying he will, and I certainly hope he won't lose), it is results like these that will be looked at, when the DNC is trying to figure out how to reform its primary system to produce candidates more likely to win in November.

They disenfranchise voters who cannot be at a certain place at a certain time, who cannot dedicate a whole evening for caucusing who - gasp - have to be ready to provide emergency medical attention, or patrol the street, or just take care of a sick child or work at their third job.

So I'll just let the discrepancy speak for itself.

have no say in the electoral process?


Why do rural states have caucuses early? Because the normal primaries are very late - for example tonight in Nebraska or June in most states.

Rural states cannot afford to fund multiple primaries in a year and the primaries are normally held for state and local offices 5 months before in June.

In almost ever case the nominations are decided early and do not last to the last few primaries as was the case this year.

One of the reasons that rural states have caucuses is so that they do not have to depend on the state's normally scheduled primary. There is no legal requirement that a state have a special presidential primary. Big states like California always have lots of ballot issues and so they have no problem simply adding a presidential primary and use it to also address other ballot measures.

Caucuses are run by the party, not dependent on the state and are very inexpensive to run.

There are other reasons for having caucuses - building party cohesion for local and state party's, building party platform, keeping the party tied to its activist base,

But eliminating the caucuses means that rural states would all be pushed to the end of the calendar and 90% of the time would have no voice in the process

I didn't realize that local offices were one of the reasons why primaries were held too late.

primary season later.

What you are saying is, because of x and y and z, we need to have undemocratic sham caucuses. What I am saying is, despite x and y and z, that is not acceptable. We are a democracy and we need to start acting like it. Not having caucuses with 1% turnout.

There are plenty of ways to fix it. The DNC can help fund them, or both can move their dates towards the middle. There is no excuse to keep running caucuses.

They are democratic for people that are serious about democracy. You could argue that primaries are lazy democracy.

When you say that caucuses are not democratic it is not true. To be undemocratic means that you would exclude people from them. Caucuses have no restriction about attendance.


When you go to a primary your input is on a candidate it takes about 5 seconds and your back watching TV


When you go to a caucus you listen to your neighbors argue about candidates and you discuss it - just like a real democracy.

Then you sit down and talk about the platform what is important to you. Against the war then convince your neighbors it has to be in the platform. Concerned about global warming then educate your neighbors and become a delegate to the county convention.

The county convention repeats the process and now you are also talking about county and state issues and county and state candidates.

And then you take it to the state level and the national level.

I live in California but miss the days when I participated in a real democracy with my neighbors when we spent a long evening talking about the party and the country. Now the consumerist mentality has become so ingrained that if you cannot consume it within 5 seconds its undemocratic.

Bullshit and by the way back in the sixties the way that we got the party to turn the corner on issues like civil rights and the Vietnam war was in the caucuses. Presidential primaries come once a year but caucuses are held every year and they build better party cohesion.

The people that are against caucuses are the people who have never participated in them. And that is why when people from big impersonal states bitch about the fucking caucuses the people in the rural areas just roll their eyes and don't even bother to talk about it.

Caucuses are involved, they are inconvenient, they require an investment of time and interest, they require that people give a shit but they are not undemocratic.

You value time. You think votes should be weighted by how much time you put in (or some other process that achieves the same effect).

Others back in the 60s valued money. Hence the poll tax. No restriction on attendance.

In fact, others back in the 60s valued race in the same way. The people controlling access to the voting booth argued that there was no formal restriction on attendance. Bullshit. We all know what happened. I don't think anyone here would call that democratic, to say the least.

I prefer to value each vote equally. An 18 year old who really doesn't care about politics, has JUST the same voice as you, who spends hours daily on a message board trying to argue these issues. If you don't like it, too bad.

Many people here with higher educations love caucuses. They think that only the people that have 3 hours to spend talking about the war or the economy deserve the right to vote. Screw the people who actually can't come to a caucus. Screw anyone who would otherwise have to fill out an absentee ballot. Screw anyone taking care of 3 children alone and can't afford a babysitter. As long as caucusgoers can hear themselves talk, caucuses are great.

So if your definition of democracy decides to value some people over others (in much more of a way than having a simple election does), then I guess caucuses are democratic, according to you.

This is the first year for a Nebraska caucus. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I do think the results were probably representative, at least at that moment in time. We're comparing apples to oranges. Why vote in a primary when delegates have already been selected? The Senate primary, though interesting, is probably mostly meaningless because Johanns is running on the Republican ticket. There's no way to correlate these primary numbers with the caucus numbers.

I will say we had to make choices about who would caucus in my family, because my granddaughter had a basketball game on that day. As I have said, I didn't caucus.

Frankly, I feel that if you think a sporting event trumps selecting a presidential candidate, maybe its your priorities that need re-examining rather than the electoral system. I think everyone can manage a day or evening for this once every 4 years.

Somebody needed to be there. My priorities are fine, thanks. I really didn't have a preference for one candidate over the other. My first and second choices had already exited, and Obama and Clinton were very close on issues. It didn't matter to me much one way or the other.

It mattered to my daughter, who has been a passionate Obama supporter from day one. One of us had to miss the caucus. So thanks for worrying about my priorities, but I think I've got 'em pretty much figured out. (p.s. my granddaughter trumps EVERY SINGLE TIME. (any questions?)

on a piece of paper their presidential preference. I don't even know whether these are bindings.

But then, in September, there are the primaries for the other local and national offices, and are mostly rubber stamps since candidates who did not get the party endorsement usually drop out of the race.

Many of them don't have reliable enough addresses for mail-in ballot drives, if their state offers them, and they tend to work obscenely long hours and aren't able to vote in primaries. Primaries tend to favor retirees and people who can take time off during the day. What is needed is a mandated election holiday, whether it's a caucus or primary or general. No one should lose pay if they choose to exercise their RIGHT as a citizen to vote. People who work in vital jobs should be allowed to submit an absentee proxy vote for a caucus.

how far did people at the edge of Cherry have to drive to get there? What if they didn't have a car? (Cherry county Nebraska was the poorest county in the entire United States as little as 10 or less years ago)

Caucuses absolutely fucked the bedrock of our party here in Nebraska.

I intend to go before the party in the spring of next year.

Clinton's campaign encouraged her supporters in Nebraska to turn out in large numbers to mess with the results of this poll. You also forgot to mention that Mike Gravel (now a member of the Libertarian Party) received 4% of the vote, probably his best result in any state. The numbers are meaningless.

by Hillary is "messing up" the results?

What kind of a bizarre logic is this?

but her style is EGO-CENTRIC. It does not encourage people to perform at their best for her campaign.

With HRC, it is all about HER. :shrug:

Seriously. I say this as someone who has witnessed her campaign on the ground in three states. Disorganization is the operating description behind her organization.

Most other countries wouldn't even consider a caucus with that low turnout democratic. Yet you are saying when a real election occurs, with 2.5 times the turnout as the caucus, any vote for Hillary is simply a vote to "mess" with a "poll," whereas any vote to Obama is a valid vote.

The sad part is this painfully pathetic logic really represents most Obama supporters' thinking here.

when Bill was running for President in 92' and 96' AND good ole' Terry McAllife help IMPLEMENT those caucus rules.

It's essentially The Clintonian RULES from the 90s that are being employed now. That's what makes HRC and her surrogates complaints disingenuous and inane.

It was our first caucus and the party is solidly behind Obama. In addition, it was well known that the results of this election do not count. Finally, Clinton only received the votes of around 12% of registered Nebraska Democrats in this meaningless election.

BTW, most other countries do not have government sanctioned primaries like the US does. So your caucus vs primary argument is irrelevant. Candidates in most countries are usually chosen by party insiders and activists, not random registered voters.

SO DID OBAMA!

And guess what -- both received fewer than single digit percentages of support in caucuses. So that seems like a pretty bogus argument. But thank you for your anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

today. I voted because I really wanted Kleeb to run for Senate. If you didn't care about that, you probably didn't show up.

But as compared to the Republican turnout where the primary vote did count, the turnout is just plain depressing, and I can't think the results are more representative of the party than the caucus results were. To be honest, I even wonder about those damnable machines that count our votes.

This shows it. In an election that really didn't matter for the Democratic nomination, Clinton came much much much closer than she did in the caucus. Without the caucus HRC would be our nominee.

they should try to convince their candidates to run as Democrats and drop the whole propping up the repub/ southern strategy thing.

If people don't want caucuses, they should work to replace them with primaries for 2012. Screw the idea of changing the rules in the middle of the game just because it benefits the Clintons.

When Obama works to get the voters out, he does a very good job of it. How hard did he work for this primary?

Since you want to consider uncontested primaries, should we start considering online polls and straw polls? Don't those represent the people too?

helps all down ticket candidates
those grassroots people arent just going to vote for him they re going to vote in ALL down ticket races
increasing turnout by returning the peoples power

Hint: it was 1964.

Carter carried the south. Clinton carried the south.

But bah, who cares about reality.

And please don't try to equate primary elections with polls. In an election, real people go out and vote. Everyone has a chance to vote. Hell, everyone has a chance to campaign. In a poll, a random sample is weighted according to unknown variables, and there is a margin of error. (And in a caucus, not everyone has a chance to vote, hence the embarrassing low turnout that other countries laugh at.)

in play. SC, LA, MS, VA. And, it's hilarious how the electability charge is leveled at Obama when he's wiping the floor with his opponent by every metric.

Yep.

They tried this same line of reasoning in Washington, where we had an awesome caucus that counted and a meaningless primary that didn't. Turns out that Obama's people had moved on to winning Wisconsin, while Hillary's people hoped to score a moral victory by... winning a meaningless primary.

Of course, she lost both the meaningless primary, and Wisconsin. And then she paid Mark Penn a billion dollars. Then she lost the nomination. The end.