Two significant milestones for us this last week. We attended our first ever Republican caucus. Hilary voted in Utah’s primary last election but it was completely new to me. Many people do not know how caucuses work. This includes the people who have already participated. The basic idea is that you get together with a bunch of people from your precinct. About 32 people showed up in our precinct. Then you elect delegates to represent our precinct. They go on to county elections and then some delegates go on to state elections which elect the delegates who go to Tampa to represent Nevada in picking our candidate.
You elect delegates before you know who they support. Our precinct was to elect 9 delegates. We only had 8 volunteers. Can you guess who they were supporting? (Hint: There were 8 people who voted for Ron Paul in our precinct).
After picking 9 delegates people gave little speeches about who they want to support. Then everyone votes for one of the four candidates. Then you tally the votes. The delegates are obligated to vote proportionally for whoever our precinct decides at the county level but after that they can vote for whoever they want.
So here’s the breakdown for our precinct.
Mitt Romney 17 votes
Ron Paul 8 votes
Newt Gingrich 4 votes
Rick something or other 3 votes
Hilary was appalled by the next part. We had to figure out how to allocate our 9 delegates. Clearly it is 5 for Romney, 2 for Paul, and the last two each get 1. I don’t want to point any fingers but some of the Paul supporters were really bad at math. They were convinced that Romney should get 4 and Paul 3. Hilary’s math teacher brain was exploding.
Then came the part where we realized almost every single delegate was a Ron Paul supporter and would say things like “I cannot in good conscience vote for Romney”.
Most people were normal. I don’t want to point any fingers but some of the Ron Paul supporters were crazy. One Paul lady said she wanted to beat the expletive out of Romney because he hates disabled people..? She also said she is supporting Paul because her kid was totally normal but then the law said he could only eat food the FDA approved and he became severely mentally retarded. She said that only legalized cannabis can cure her son.
The moral of the story is we should just do primaries and avoid that 2-hour long disaster. For any Paul supporters reading this, we do not intend offense. We like a lot of what Paul says and I find him to be completely honest, genuine and true. It’s not his fault he attracts some crazies. Wanting to legalize drugs may have contributed.
The other significant new experience was that Saturday night we had a salad for dinner. For the first time ever we bought a salad, prepared it and ate it. We even enjoyed it. I guess we’ve
become grown-ups.