I Went To The Nevada Democratic Caucus Today: Wow! Look Out Bush...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I went to the Nevada Democratic Caucus today at Chapparal High School in Las Vegas. It is really a non-binding, straw ballot, as there really is a Primary vote in April. They hold this to give Dems a chance to voice an opinion before it is too late to matter.

Four years ago, about 700 people showed up for the caucus.

Today?

Over 6,000 people showed up!

They were parking 10 blocks away and walking to the high school. The fire marshalls had to close the gym due to the crowd. Luckily, the weather was great so they moved the whole group to the football stadium outside. You had to see it to believe it. Talk about a motivated group…all ages, all races - some dressed like they were going to church and some folks you would expect to see at biker bar.

Every representative of the candidates had one message. No matter who was eventually nominated, they were getting all our votes come November and the crowd went wild.

To see and hear a crowded football stadium chant, “No More Bush” at the top of their lungs was a great Valentine’s gift. I was duly impressed.

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Those numbers are really impressive! This could get really interesting…

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DMark! OMG! My mom was there!

From her email to me:

So if you encountered an older lady, about 5’1" with short red hair and probably wearing khakis and a t-shirt, that was her!

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It’s happening all over. This was in the paper here last week:

What is particularly stirring the expatriate American Democrats this election year, however, is that in being regularly exposed to the attitudes of their host nations many find themselves embarrassed by their president to a level they haven’t felt before.

“Its not so much anti-Americanism I sense here as it is Bush being an alienating factor (in foreign attitudes),” said Bailey Kasten, 20, of Wilton, Iowa, a student from the American University in Washington who is now at the college’s London campus and who supports former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

“There are a lot of angry people here tonight,” said Rachelle Valladeres, international chairwoman of the Democratic Party Abroad, who had to change the venue of the London caucus to accommodate at least twice the number originally expected. “It’s the same everywhere. We haven’t had such a surge in interest in the organization’s 40-year history.”

Some 156 Democrats showed up Sunday at a meeting room at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo – almost twice the number expected and four times more than in 1996 and 2000. Six hundred attended a caucus in Paris where no more than 300 had been expected.

London, with probably the world’s largest concentration of expatriate Americans, traditionally has the largest number of active Democrats and Republicans.

To the crowd of more than 600 Democrats who were spilling over two large rooms at the London caucus, Valladeres said: "Democrats are really, really energized. This organization has more than doubled in size in the last 12 months.

“We’ve got branches in parts of the world we’ve never had before. Austria (as a branch) didn’t exist four weeks ago. We’ve got 68 people in Armenia – I didn’t know we even had any Americans in Armenia! South Africa, Malawi, Kenya and the Cameroon have started up in just the last two months. We’ve had caucuses in Bosnia, Korea, Colombia.”