This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on the Nevada Caucuses. The previous part is here.
2.0 The Democratic Caucus – sorta dirty, but not in a fun way.
My wife dressed my 7 year old daughter in a tutu that looked like an American flag and my son in a shirt that had a print of the Constitution on it. We figured if it was going to be their first exposure to democracy, we should have some fun. We explained what was going to happen, and they gave no shits at all. I’m sure they will just remember it as some goddamned place they had to go before their friends’ birthday party.
As we approached the Democratic Caucus, it was clear that this was no place for fun, lightheartedness, or child like wonder. There was a green haze made of metamucil-induced farts bonded to industrial-grade ennui. The voting had not yet begun, in fact the doors were not even open. There were only two candidates to vote for, but everyone in line was already defeated.
You got the impression that everyone felt like they had really missed out on something. They were neighborly enough, but just so downtrodden. None of them had been happy, or even smiled, in 20 years. The only person smiling was the guy running up and down the line from the Atheist Alliance. You could tell that he had changed his bong water and set his alarm early for a wake and bake. He hugged me after I gave him a fist bump. There were a few other people that smiled weakly at him. Like the gothapottamus about 10 yards back who had obviously taken the day off from listening to The Cure and cutting herself. Everyone else was relatively colorless. It looked like a morass of humanity that had been washed on “warm” by a college kid for an entire semester. Even the black people in line seemed pale — and bizarrely enough, every one of them had one eye that looked like it was not quite human, but more like something you would find on a giant grouper. It was like they found all the broken black people and made new ones out of the busted up parts.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the suburban Democratic electorate.
It really shouldn’t have been that way. My neighborhood is actually a vibrant and happy place full of bicycles and delightfully spoiled children. There aren’t that many very young adults, but there are a lot of youngish MILFs. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf down the street is known for two things — kosher pastries and hot MILFs in yoga pants. Honestly, if you can go to a strip club or hang out at the Coffee Bean, you might as well go to the Coffee Bean. Imagine if the crop of strippers at your favorite pole-dancing establishment decided that they were going to quit while they were ahead, so they hung up the lucite heels and traded them in for Lululemon, and then just decided to hang around and drink matcha tea while trying to give me a hard on. I feel like a 15 year old at the chalk board when I go into this place.
So where the fuck did they put all those MILFs? Where did they find the “walking dead” to replace them? Fucked if I knew. I was confused though. An entire crowd of voters, and not a single hot mom in yoga pants…
They scheduled the caucus on a Saturday morning. That struck me as a bit sketchy right off the bat. My precinct is pretty heavily Jewish. MILFy and Jewish. Not just Jews from back East either. Los Angeles Jews who came to escape California’s income tax, and Israelis who came to escape Palestinian home made rockets. Beautiful MILF Israelis.
Needless to say, there are quite a few observant Jews who do not roll on Shabbos. Would they have come even if it was on a weekday? Would they have voted one way or the other? Hard to say. But, if I were the DNC, and I had already anointed Hillary as the heir apparent, I’d probably want to discourage Jews from coming to the polls. Lets face it, if you jog on over in your Yoga pants and you’re not sure who you want to vote for, you might as well throw in with the fellow Tribe member, right?
Since you can’t just throw bacon at people in line, having the caucus on Shabbat seems like the best way to keep as many Jews away as possible. I dunno… maybe Hillary could develop a sonic weapon that drives Jews away next time one challenges her authoritah.
Caucuses generally favor the party favorite, since it takes a lot more effort to caucus than to just come in, mark a ballot, and then go home. For a caucus, you go there and get locked in for a while. The Democratic Party held its caucus with a one hour window of opportunity — the line started at 11 AM, and if you were not in line at 12:00 PM, you were out. I showed up at 11:15, and there was already a line snaking around the corner, with cars dropping off carloads of dead-looking people wearing Hillary shirts or buttons.
It was awfully early in the day for anyone who was up late the night before though. In other words, not a lot of millennials in line. A few. Not a lot. The gothapottamus was clearly a millennial. A few kids here and there who weren’t sure if they were registered to vote. They generally didn’t seem to grasp the concept of soap either, so voter registration was clearly a huge bummer. Of course, I never saw these kids at the Coffee Bean either, so maybe they just inhabited a corner of my precinct where the walking dead lived. I personally try and practice good hygiene, not for myself, but so that the yoga pants MILFs will talk to me.
My precinct took quite a while after 12:00 for everyone to get inside. At another, an eyewitness told me that he dashed in at 11:59 and some change, and that a group of 5 kids wearing Bernie shirts got the stiff arm about 10 seconds later. “Nope, you need to be in at noon. You’re late. Buh buye”. I did not ask him about yoga panted MILFs at his precinct.
Once inside, the stench was unbearable. It was in an elementary school cafeteria/gym and it smelled of bug spray and the impending death of at least 10% of the people inside. In my precinct, there were just a few Sanders supporters, and they herded us into a small penned off area. It felt like we were in one of those “free speech zones” that the kids are all into these days. Hillary supporters were there, in shirts announcing which union had sent them, and they slowly circled the Socialist Petting Zoo we were in. On a table was a fresh, unopened deck of cards.
I figured the cards were there so that we wouldn’t get bored. So I cracked them open and started playing Scopa with my kids. I found out later that this was the deck of cards they would have used to break a tie, had there been one. A woman near me asked what we were playing, and when I tried to explain the rules to the game to her, she got flustered and said “that doesn’t make any sense, you’re just making the rules up! I don’t understand! Its too complicated!” My five year old whispered to me that she was “a dumbass,” and my seven year old asked me if she had Alzheimer’s like her grandmother. I told her I didn’t think so.
The benefits of a caucus for the “party candidate” were clear. You could tell that there were some people there who genuinely adored their chosen candidate. Others were there picking her as the lesser of two evils. But, the Hillary squad also had some very clear “enforcers” there to make sure that nobody thought better of where they were sitting. When my wife checked in, the woman before her said she was there to caucus for Sanders. The woman checking her in said “Are you sure about that? You sure you wouldn’t rather be undecided?” She changed her mind and went with undecided. At that, she went to sit down, with a guy in a “carpenter’s union” shirt going over to talk to her. This idiot could have been convinced to vote for the giant grouper that gave its eye to one of the broken spare-parts bin black people.
The racial divide was pretty clear — with absolutely zero black people on the Bernie side. I only talked to two of them directly. Both of them had been told by their preacher how much better the Clintons are for “us black folks.” When I addressed them about that, the words “my African American friends…” got out of my mouth, when someone who had been silently listening jumped in with a “don’t you dare go there!” I’m not sure who they were, or why, or if they were talking to me or my new friends… since that grouper eye always looks somewhere in the distance. I guess that in ennui fart land, you are not allowed to fraternize with the negroes.
And the union reps were always circling. When the speeches got too much in favor of the Bernie camp, they started interfering. One guy told me to sit down and shut up. I yelled at him to wander on over and try and make me. Another guy in a union shirt joined in, and I yelled to him “give it a shot, you fucking punk…” Yes, we were in the middle of a caucus, and it was about to turn into a fist fight. Someone who claimed to be in charge told me that she was going to have me removed if I wasn’t “nice.” Pointed to her Union buddies and said, “who’s going to remove me, those fucking cunts? Fuck you. You’re not getting me out of here without physically removing me, and the first motherfucker who puts their hands on me isn’t leaving here with all their teeth.”
Yeah, there was almost a brawl. Go figure, I was in the middle of it.
Then we voted.
All in all, I wouldn’t call it “very dirty” though. Scheduling it to make sure only old people came? Well, if Madison and Tyler can’t get the fuck out of bed in the morning, that is hardly what I would call “voter suppression.” Saturday to keep the Jews away? I would imagine it wasn’t by design, but then again, how the hell do you schedule an election on a day that so clearly means that an entire segment of the electorate is religiously prohibited from showing up? I’d chalk it up to the DNC wanting less Hebrews at the election, given that the disfavored upstart is ostensibly one of them. But, it was on a Saturday in 2008 too. I’ll call this one just a hell of a faux pas.
The preachers, union reps, and poll workers who were actually pushing people to change their vote, or making damn sure “their” people stayed exactly where the hell they wanted them? Classic politics, but still dirty shit. All in all, on a scale of 1 to 10 with a 1 being a town meeting in rural Massachusetts, and a 5 being what a first world country should expect, and a 10 being Florida or Chicago, I’d call the Democratic caucus at a 6. Still dirtier than a first world country should be, but I wouldn’t chalk Hillary’s win up to dirty games. What really won her the election is that she was organized, even if it meant payoffs to ministers and unions. When your base is people who mainline geritol, you’re always going to beat an enthusiastic band of voters who have to ask “aw, Mason, is that today, dude?”
I stole the deck of cards. Good thing there wasn’t a tie.
NEXT: Part 3 – Amongst the Republicans
This post originally appeared on Popehat. View it here.
