The turnout in the 12th ward was about 20% that of a year ago. No precinct
filled out their delegate slots. Preliminary numbers, I still have one small
precinct out, show we elected 270 of a possible 424 delegates. Of the 270
elected as delegates at least 66 were elected as a result of absentee
petitions. This suggests a total attendance of just over 200 people,
perhaps as many as 250 as some attendees did not want to be delegates. This
contrasts with 1276 attendees at 12th ward caucuses last year.
In addition to what ever efforts were made by the various campaigns, and
organized labor, (and I note that these efforts clearly lead to at least a
portion of the absentee letters,) the 62nd district sent out a 3500 piece
mailing to everyone who caucused last year, whether they became a delegate
or not, and launched a phone calling campaign to past delegates. I
personally called through my precinct list. We also sent out an email
reminder to our list of email addresses last week to remind people of
caucuses and other district events. In addition, we promoted the mayoral
debate. So we clearly went out of our way to promote attendance at the
caucuses, despite my personal objections to the process.
This raises a multitude of questions. If aldermanic races in other
districts lead to full slates in some wards and only partial slates in
others, will the city convention be fairly representative of the city DFL?
I believe not. This particular issue could be resolved by decreasing the
number of delegates by 50%, or in essence allowing only one delegate for 50
DFL votes in key races as opposed to 1 for 25 as is now the case. This
proposal was voted down at the last Central committee meeting, I think
because there were a lot of newer representatives who thought somehow this
was a plan to suppress participation. In fact it is a proposal to strengthen
to validity of the system. It has the drawback of making caucuses
competitive. Delegates will actually have to face election at the precinct
level. This can be time consuming and requires a higher degree of caucus
convener skills. It might however serve to encourage people to actually
attend rather than rely on submitting a letter to become enfranchised.
As to the broader question as to whether or not these caucuses were a
success, I'm still willing to wait a bit to get some more info before going
full bore on the attack. I'd like to see a show of hands at each ward
convention as to how many people in attendance were delegates the prior
year, and how many were totally new to the process. I suspect the city wide
candidates are probably happy. They now only have to mail and campaign to a
portion of the people they would have had to campaign to had last years
delegates held over. I somehow doubt that the number of new people allowed
entry by this years caucus will overshadow the number of delegates who did
not return.
I'd be interested in some numbers from other wards.
Earl Netwal
NENA
62nd Dist DFL Chair
12th Ward Convener
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