Passionate Democracy

Dear Friends,

Today I attended the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party Senate District 61 Convention, as a Delegate, elected at my precinct caucus on March 1.  Minnesota has many Senate Districts.  District 61 includes the western part of downtown Minneapolis as well as the southwest part of the city.  There are about 82,000 people, 90% white and fairly affluent.  It consistently wins the largest voter turnout among Senate Districts in Minnesota which consistently is among the top turnout states in the country.  It is heavily DFL (we are not just Democrats, we are the Democratic Farmer Labor Party).

DFL caucuses and conventions are always interesting affairs.  Since we always use proportionate voting we often have walking sub caucuses.  In the years before we had a vote for Presidential candidate preference, these walking sub caucuses were really important to the campaign to maximize the number of delegates for your Presidential choice.  The preference vote has eliminated some of the significance of the walking sub caucuses because ultimately the delegates to the Democratic National Convention from Minnesota must be proportionate to the results of the Presidential preference vote, excluding super delegates, of course.

There were over 400 delegates at the convention over half of whom had never been to a Senate District Convention.  Since walking sub caucuses are not needed at most precinct caucuses virtually none of those delegates had any experience with walking sub caucuses.  I will not try to fully explain walking sub caucuses, but I will give you a little flavor for what happens.  Our Senate District gets to send 31 delegates to the Minnesota State Convention where the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are chosen.  Viable sub caucuses get to elect delegates.  Simplistically, to be viable you would need to have 400/31= 13 delegates in your sub caucus to be viable.  It is not that simple since the number of delegates changes (usually dropping) as the day goes on, but forget about that.  To those of us that have been through this process many times, it is obvious that you need a fairly broad based sub caucus if you want to be viable.  Newcomers to the system need to learn this lesson through experience.

Any delegate can nominate a sub caucus.  The name must include a Presidential candidate (or uncommitted) and may also contain other items.  There were several very broad sub caucuses - "Sanders", "Clinton" and "Uncommitted" without any other issue.  There were also others.  The sub caucus that I joined was a combination of several smaller sub caucuses, all of which started with Sanders and then more issues - "Racial and Social Justice", "Black Lives Matter", "Restore the Vote to Felons", "End the War on Drugs", and several others.  Our sub caucus ended up with the name "Sanders: Racial and Social Justice #BLM".

There were about 35 sub caucuses nominated for Sanders, about an equal number nominated for Clinton and 6 nominated for uncommitted.  Since a sub caucus has to be able to elect at least one delegate to the state convention and since our convention is only allowed to send 31 delegates to the state convention, the maximum number of viable sub caucuses is 31.  So we had way more than double the number of sub caucuses nominated than could be viable.  The process involves walking among the sub caucuses to get into one that is viable.  In addition, you can get quite sophisticated about maximizing the number of delegates for your candidate.  If 12 is the number to be viable, and you have 36 delegates who are for your Presidential candidate, you want them to get 3 delegates.  If one sub caucus has 20 and one has 16, you will only get 2 delegates but if you can move 4 from the 16 sub caucus to the 20 sub caucus you will get 3 delegates.  As I said before this strategy is not as important now that the delegates to the national convention must be in the proportion of the preference vote.  Nevertheless it is important to send delegates that are really committed to your candidate as the actual people at the convention, if it is contested, are important.

We had 49 delegates in our sub caucus and were awarded 4 delegates and 4 alternates.  The gender balance rules required that we have 2 delegates who identified as male and 2 who identified as female.  We also had to have the same number of alternates with the same gender balance.  We also had to rank the alternates by gender identification.  The rules get even more complex if you have a uneven number of delegates.  In that case the number of female and male delegates and alternates has to be equal.  So if you get 3 delegates and 2 identify as women you need to have the other delegate identifying as male and 2 of the three alternates identifying as male and one as female.  You also must rank the alternates by gender.  In addition the entire convention (the combination of all the sub caucuses) must be gender balanced.  As we are reminded from time to time during the convention, when we are voting we are also supposed to consider increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups.

As you can see, it takes a kind of a nerd to enjoy this process, and I do.  The caucus system itself is not democratic at all and should be changed but the current process is fascinating.

I was considering running as a delegate, but when I saw the group of people in this sub caucus, it was clear that they were the future of the DFL, the Democratic Party and our country.  Our sub caucus was not at all gender balanced.  We had way more females than males.  Despite our plea to the parliamentarian that our delegates should reflect the ratio of female to male in our sub caucus, we had to elect equal numbers of males and females.  Each sub caucus determines its own election rules except that the results need to meet the DFL gender balance rules.  We determined to eschew a secret ballot and go by raising hands.  It was the only realistic way given the number of people that wanted to be delegates, but it does make it very difficult on the people who want to be delegates to see what the vote count is.  It is intimidating to put yourself forward and have people vote about you right in front of your face.  I am very proud of all the young people who because of their passion were willing to face that prospect.

Our group of 8 delegates/alternates was for our district quite diverse - 3 black women, 1 latino male, 1 transgender and virtually all of whom were under 50 and at least 6 of whom were probably under 30.  Their stories and pitches were passionate, enthusiastic and very diverse.  It made me proud to be a DFLer and gave me great hope for the future.  Their passion must not be squashed or in any way subdued.  It must be encouraged and supported.  If the future of our world is in their hands, all will be great.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal