As I did with the Precinct Caucuses on March 3rd, I’ll be attempting to Live Tweet the Snohomish County Republican Convention today.
Follow me @Abulsme.
For those who remember my tweets on March 3rd only three people showed up for my precinct and given there were three delegate slots available to the county convention, all three of us became delegates to the next level. Although it is non-binding, I had expressed my preference for Ron Paul. (The other two supported Santorum.) Last weekend I attended an orientation meeting for the Ron Paul delegates. For those interested, I talked a little about that meeting on the last episode of Curmudgeon’s Corner.
I should have left home already to get all settled at the convention before the crowds arrive. But a few notes before I go…
According to the orientation I had last week, in my legislative district, the 44th, almost half of the delegates are Romney supporters, about 25% are Ron Paul Supporters, 15% or so did not have a stated preference, and Santorum and Paul split the rest. There are a little over 260 delegates expected for our LD (I forget the exact number). For anybody to get elected as a delegate to the next level they need more than 50% of the vote of all of the delegates in the LD. This means that if every body shows up and all the Romney folks just vote for each other (and are disciplined and vote for the SAME Romney people), and just a small number of the uncommitted delegates also vote for Romney’s folks, then Romney will end up with 100% of the delegates to the next level, even though he got just under 50% of the delegates from the first round.
Meanwhile, if all the Ron Paul folks (for instance) just vote for each other, then none of them gets over 50% of the total vote, and they get no delegates to the next level despite the 25% showing in the first round.
Interesting how these things work.
For the non-Romney campaigns, the hope is that basically:
- A bunch of the Romney delegates don’t bother showing up (and disproportionately so compared to their own delegates)
- Discipline among the Romney delegates to vote for a consistent slate is low, allowing others to sneak in
- The three non-Romney’s delegates will vote for each other to stop Romney, even though they don’t necessarily like each other.
It will be fun. Oh, and we’ll get to hear speeches from a ton of local Republican politicians. Woo!
Oh, and for the record once again, I am supporting Ron Paul in the Republican caucus process because I think he is the best of the four Republicans currently running. I completely reserve judgement on who I will support in the fall. I’ll think about that once it is completely clear who all the people are on the ballot (not just the Republican and Democrat, which is pretty clear at this point absent some sort of seismic event).
OK. Off I go…