So early voting for the Nevada Democratic caucus started Saturday. I was wondering if I should give up my third-party registration to participate, especially since while the Nevada party was sensible enough to ditch the “Shadow” app that turned the Iowa caucus into an even bigger clusterfuck than usual, there still seemed to be a chance that caucus workers could be tripped up because that decision meant the process was still in flux.
And what is the point of changing my registration when I’ve basically decided to vote for the NotBananaRepublican major nominee in the general election anyway?
But then I asked myself the question I often ask at points of decision:
What would Robert Fripp do?
What really convinced me to participate in the Democratic caucus was the fact that in addition to early voting, this version of the caucus has something equivalent to ranked-choice voting, which journalists like the New York reporter seem to think will complicate the results even further. It will probably be slower to tabulate than a standard primary but overall it will take less time than a standard caucus, especially since ranked-choice has the winnowing effect of a standard caucus without the laborious process of needing to take a whole afternoon or longer and risk having to meet other people and negotiate your preference with them, which is where civilization often breaks down.
Local news had reported long lines in some areas, but my nearest polling place was a Mexican supermarket, and I got there around noon and it wasn’t all that crowded and the line moved quickly. The process involves confirming your registration (or changing it if you aren’t already a Democrat) and then explaining the ballot, after which you were told to go into a small room in the supermarket and fill out the card. There are five columns that you fill out in order of preference, so that if you like Biden, you’d put Biden as first column and then (in the expectation that he doesn’t win) your second-best preference and so on. You don’t have to mark all the names, but you have to get at least one and leave the others “uncommitted.”
Recalling from memory, I think the ballots list the names in alphabetical order, so I eliminated Bennett, Yang and Patrick (the people who dropped out after New Hampshire), Mike Bloomberg (who didn’t think enough of my state to get himself on the ballot) and Amy Klobuchar, who is still viable but is not in my priorities. I have never seen any politician smile so much with so little cheer other than Chuck Schumer. I rest my case.
So in this order I picked: Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, Tom Steyer.
In reverse preference: Steyer (unlike Bloomberg) at least seems to be a good guy and actual progressive (as opposed to statist). I do not like his term limits idea, but he seems to be willing to deal with corruption in the government.
Biden is, or would be, a good centrist choice. I would really prefer the Biden of 2016 to this one, but it’s been pointed out by more than one leftist that even in earlier years, Biden’s presidential campaigns have never polled much better than they are now.
Warren is a good moderate-to-progressive choice. I think she could potentially be a “uniter” in a way that my other two choices aren’t. Sanders alienates the centrists and Pete Buttigieg alienates the leftists. I am not sure why Warren isn’t doing better, but hopefully in this system, she’ll get something out of Nevada.
Now I’d already mentioned that I prefer Pete Buttigieg. I think he has the knowledge and personality elements (moderation and common sense) that made Obama a winner last decade, but he doesn’t have Obama’s naive assertion that Republicans will work with him, so he’s a little more inclined to serious changes, including eliminating the filibuster (which makes him more ‘progressive’ on that score than Senators Warren and Sanders). I also think that phrasing his healthcare plan as “Medicare for all who want it” may persuade people who are scared off by the idea that nationalized medicine will eliminate their choice. You may disagree.
Why then did I pick Sanders as first preference? Well, if in Fripp’s phrase, we need radical action to unseat “monkey mind” – the reflexive, unthinking mentality – that applies almost as much to the Democratic Party as to Trump’s Banana Republicans. I’d said before, but Trump and Sanders are parallels in certain ways (and not just the cotton-candy hair). Both of them didn’t really belong in their parties’ establishments, but they both realized that in order to accomplish their ultimate goals, they needed one of the two ruling parties behind them. It’s just that Trump’s scheme worked and Sanders didn’t, for various reasons. Namely, the Democrats were already effectively aligned with Obama’s designated successor, who’d made a deal to be in his Administration in exchange for supporting his campaign, and who superficially seemed like the best qualified candidate. Trump was dealing with a vast array of primary challengers, but he caught the support of a populist base that like him didn’t get along with the institutional party. Not only that, they were so desperate and scared of what the other party would do to change the country after years out of the White House that even the establishment types got in line. Well, that’s where the Democrats are now. It’s just a question of whether they will get out of their own way to win the election or if they would rather lose and keep a grip on their party. I’d already mentioned that a lot of old-school Democrats would rather do the latter. And along with that, I’d mentioned that while I would prefer moderate methods, what we are calling “radical socialism” is very much mainstream in other developed countries, but is now considered Satanic by the American Right, and the American Left has been basically whipped into going along. I had said, “It is still a legitimate question as to who pays for all that shit, and what the broader costs of redistribution would be, but it is not a literally unthinkable policy. I have seen people on the Internet make serious arguments – namely, the point that America spends more money on healthcare, including government money, than ‘socialist’ countries in the European Union, and gets worse results – but hardly anybody in the Democratic Party institution will make these arguments.”
In many ways, the Democratic Party – as the designated institution for support of modern American government – is the main force in the way of a serious reordering of priorities. It is conservative in the sense that it wants to keep things the way they were, for the benefit of its own group. That is a bad thing, and even the Trumpniks are capable of realizing this, which is why Trump got so much mileage out of ragging the Democratic (and Republican) establishment. But temperamental conservatism also means that Democrats are the last defenders of “the rule of law” and what Trump calls “the deep state” (that is, the institutions that do not see serving his whim as the charter of their existence). If the Republican Party is now completely lost, Democrats have to reform their own institution, so that it is trustworthy and can make necessary changes. Sanders, and arguably Warren, are the only two candidates in serious position to do that. And with every indication that the leftist/centrist/Hi, I’m Mike Bloomberg and I’m Buying This Party Because I Can wings of the party are heading towards a brokered convention, I decided that Sanders needs to maintain his momentum and demonstrate to his party, as Trump did with Republicans, that he is the person who needs to be listened to.
So there it is. I took the plunge.
Don’t make me regret this, Democrats.