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Questions about a caucus in Michigan (or Florida)
The DNC has asked MI and FL to hold caucuses to
select delegates that the DNC is willing to seat at the convention in
Denver. To date these states have been cool to this idea.
However, as FlyOnTheWall has suggested elsewhere, the time might soon arrive when the Clinton campaign, realizing that they are behind in the delegate counts and need delegates from these states to be seated (if only to secure the votes of super-delegates like Gov Granholm and Senators Stabenow, Levin and Nelson), decides that such caucuses are in their best interests and call for Florida and Michigan to move forward on such a proposal.
If so, certain questions will need answers. To wit:
1) Are these caucuses closed or open? That is, are they for onlyregistered democrats, or can independants and moderates also participate. A follow-up question here is how open or how closed. Are they open only to folks who voted in the democratic primaries in these states?
2) Will delegates be apportioned to congressional districts equally, according to democratic voter turnout in the last few elections (as they are doing in TX) or according to some other criterion?
3) Will rural districts be given more weight than urban districts, as was done in NV?
Each of these factors could, depending on how it is answered, benefit one candidate or the other. As such, it is not unreasonable to expect a bitter fight over such details if such caucuses were to be proposed. In light of that consideration, are such caucuses even possible, or would the fighting between partisans of each campaign make it impossible to draw up the charter for such caucuses?




Comments (1)
Hm, I see that my HTML did not come out so well. Oh well, folks can still see the URLs that I meant to link, so they can find my sources for those claims if they want to copy and paste the URLs into their address bars. Sorry for the ungainlyness of it all.
February 11, 2008 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
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