Andrew over at NPI blog writes a post about I guess improving the precinct caucus system, but spends the entire time defending them against folks that like the primary. Good for him, but I would really have liked to hear some ideas on improvement.
Seriously.
Because it’s been a demoralizing few months leading up to the precinct caucuses.
Anyway, I’ll start a list. Feel free to join in when you’re ready.
1. Hold caucuses more often. Why do we only force folks to attend a precinct caucus when we want them to choose a presidential nominee? If all that hooey about getting out of the house, meeting your neighbors and freedom of association was not a big lie, then we should hold caucuses to nominate every Democratic candidate, from governor down to state legislator and county commissioner. Not dog catcher, because we don’t elect dog catchers in this state.
Pros: Like I said, we would actually do what we mean when we defend the caucuses.
Cons: If you thought it was hard to pull off the presidential cycle caucuses, what makes you think we can do this all the time? Then again, fewer people will turn out for non-interesting caucuses.
This stuff costs money too, and the primaries the state pays for.
And, can’t we just have it both ways? Private political organization when it suits our needs and public, primary based party when we don’t have the money?
2. Hold them in separate rooms. One of the major complaints that I keep on running into following the caucuses was that people couldn’t hear what was going on because there were more than one being held in one room.
That was reality because a) we couldn’t book classrooms because of student privacy issues and b) we didn’t expect 10 percent of the voters to show up. More like 6 percent or something.
But, we as Dems should make a list of all the publically available small rooms in the entire state that are ADA accessible, just so people can have quiet civic conversations.
And, that’s it. I don’t have any more ideas.
