(Because in the absence of data I have to rely on anecdotes–usually to my detriment – promoted by Danny the Red (hair))
Yesterday was the first day of County Assemblies. I know several met in both parties. On the Dem side, the bigger counties meeting were Adams, Larimer, and Weld.
Any results? How many delegates to state for the US Senate candidates?
Any surprises in legislative districts?
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With very few exceptions, this weekend was all Romanoff. Most of the uncommitted went with Romanoff and Bennet’s team fell short turning their people out. Some people will say that caucus and assemblies don’t mean much but if this is a sign of each team’s ability to organize and turn out their supporters then Romanoff’s rag-tag bunch did a pretty impressive job.
Here are the results I’ve been told:
Adams: Romanoff went from 47% at caucus to 62% at assembly. A little birdie tells me Adams was being hotly contested all day and into the weekend and I hear a certain former state rep is trying to seat 2 family members as Bennet delegates even though neither signed in at the assembly and the credentials committee says they are leaving that to the state to sort out – expect fireworks there if Peek-Dunstone and Waak let that go.
Larimer: Romanoff went from 39% at caucus to 48.5% at assembly
Weld: Romanoff turned the county to his column from 46% at caucus to 52% at assembly
Morgan: Romanoff went from 47% at caucus to 58% at assembly
Clear Creek: Romanoff went from 85% at caucus to 100% at assembly
Delta: Romanoff went from 33% at caucus to 43% at assembly
Lake: Romanoff went from 5% at caucus to 73% at assembly where 23% stayed uncommitted vs 87% at
caucus though that was just a preference poll and it sounds like they are all being encouraged to stay uncommitted
Kiowa: Romanoff went from0% at caucus where 100% were uncommitted to 100% for Romanoff at assembly
Park: Romanoff went from 80% at caucus to 100% at assembly
Conejos: Romanoff went from 47% at caucus to 62% at assembly
Crowley: Bennet pushed Romanoff down from 60% at caucus to 50% at assembly
Conejos: Bennet pushed Romanoff down from 66% at caucus to 57% at assembly
A handful of assemblies next weekend should be interesting and then Super Saturday on April 10.
Don’t want to be accused of misleading: NONE of these are official results from the counties. I’m not aware of official #s being posted anywhere. Some of these I got from a press release Romanoff put out, some were from news articles and most were from friends on both campaigns who were at the assemblies.
articles?
Don’t have them all bookmarked but here are a few I had found:
http://www.berthoudrecorder.co…
http://www.coloradoan.com/arti…
http://www.statebillnews.com/2…
until populace counties like Arapahoe, Douglas and Jefferson weigh in. Of course Romanoff will win top line but I think you’ll see Bennet maintain a stronger showing. Organization for getting Bennet delegates to county is very strong in Arapahoe and Douglas.
In Clear Creek, Kiowa and Park counties, specifically. It would seem to us that it would be hard for ANY candidate to get 100% unless we’re talking about just a handful of people.
If a candidate does not get the 15% threshold, they do not send delegates. So if it is 76% Romanoff and 14% Bennet, 10% Uncommitted that translates into 100% support for Romanoff in terms of the delegates who get to vote at the next stage: the state assembly where the candidate(s) is(are) actually picked.
http://coloradocaucus.com/
Kiowa had eight people total.
There are still 10 precincts who either haven’t reported in, or whose results are not on the chart.
I’d love to see the results in a couple of coded map that shows intensity of candidate preference and shift from caucus to assembly.
What useful inf. would you think might be revealed?
If they both get to 30% at State, they’re on the ballot. Would the map tell you anything else?
If these numbers are accurate, (and the second Conejos should have been Costilla), that translates to roughly 264 state delegates for Romanoff (53%) to 236 for Bennet (47%).
These are very rough numbers as I don’t have all the data. (like are there Uncommitted delegates to state from any of these counties besides Lake? Did all of the delegate slots get filled? etc, etc)
And this is only 500 of the 4043 delegates so far. Like you said, the 10th is “Super Saturday” with 9 of the Big 13 meeting that day.
I was copying/pasting from a bunch of emails I received and messed up one line. The first Conejos is incorrect – Conejos Bennet pushed Romanoff down from 66% at caucus to 57% at assembly. In Gunnison, Romanoff went down from 59% at caucus to 55% at assembly.
The numbers change slightly, but the spread 53-47 remains the same.
This is an interesting thread, and it makes me wonder how things are done in other counties.
Mine, Prowers, is pretty small. We have around 9,000 registered voters, and the last time I checked the stats on VAN we have roughly 1/3 each for Dems, Reps and Us.
In order to encourage participation, we have a very liberal (as it were) allowance of #s of delegates to the county assembly per precinct. It’s pretty much a case of, “If you come to caucus and WANT to go on to vote at assembly, you’re in.”
Our total county percentage at caucus was 61.9% Romanoff, 30.95% for Bennet and 7.14% undecided. That last was 3 people out of 42. So as you can see, in a small county it only takes a few people who can’t attend to make a BIG change in the overall percentage.
Of course then you have to turn the overall percentage into who gets what delegates to the state conv-sembly. I think Prowers gets 4 delegates and 4 alternates, so even if our percentages did not change, I THINK this would mean two Romanoff delegates and either 2 for Bennet or 1 Bennet and 1 Undecided. (I’m not the person in charge of figuring this out at Assembly, so I could be wrong.)
Anyone else have light to shed on this arcane ritual?
Just follow the funnel.
Caucus by precinct – at least 15% to get any delegate (s) to the next level (sounds like a county assembly in your neighborhood). So if 6 people show up to caucus, 15% is 1 person preferance polling. Just about every registered D in the state is eligible to attend.
Assemble – and preference poll again to send delegates to state. No less than 2 delegates per precinct, but potentially tens of thousands could assemble
State – all the delegates (and seated alternates) preference poll. A candidate needs at least 30% to be on the primary ballot and whichever candidate has the higher preference gets to be listed on the ballot “first”, i.e., top line. I think we could have 4500 D delegates at state this year.
Caucus/assembly/convention process is over.
For candidates who don’t get 30% for any reason, they can submit petition signatures to get on the ballot that way. Example- Bennet or Romanoff could end up with less than 30% at state. Either could petition on. Or a new D primary challenger could emerge- and petition on. Yes, that’s right, there is no requirement that a candidate go through the caucus/assembly/convention. They could just show up after that’s over and petition on.
Then later in the summer we have an actual, no kidding, voting primary. And whoever wins the most votes is the D nominee. Every registered D in the state is eligible to vote.
And there is no way for the non-winning candidate (s) to be on the general election ballot some other way. They could run a write in campaign- but they won’t be listed on the ballot.
So, as far as the primary goes, the caucus is not quite meaningless, but it’s close. Unless you put huge faith in the process or getting to be top line on the ballot.
The process which this year produced 23,000 caucus attendees, less than 2% of those eligible. And the top line which may have once been important, but which seems to be meaningless based on recent experience. And a top line for which I can imagine the only useful advantage being the uninformed voter who believes being listed first means anything.
The primary vote means everything. Win big at the caucus/assembly/ and lose the primary and it’s over. Don’t even bother to show up for caucus, petition on and win the primary and you are the nominee.
Of course then you gotta win the general election a few weeks later or what’s the point.
That’s a good, useful explanation!
Denver is the largest county in terms of how many delegates we get to send to state (636). Our formula for county assembly starts with two questons: how big of a county assembly can we afford a space for; and how many delegates do we need from each precinct to adequately reflect candidate preference. This year we decided an average of 4 per precinct would be adequate to reflect preference between two candidates (based on US Senate race) which set the total county assembly at about 1700 delegates. This was financially feasible.
From there, the delegate selection plan for the county is derived from the DNC’s rule that it must balance population with “democratic performance” (which of course is not defined). Actual population per precinct is a hard number to come up with, so we use active voters as a reasonable substitute.
“Democratic Performance” is currently calculated using a combination of Democratic voter registration and turn out for Pres. Obama in 2008. A math wizard in our county (not me) sets up a spreadshhet that does all these calculations and comes up with a number of delegates from each precinct with the target total of about 1700. The actual number of delegates elected to go to County Assembly was only about 1500 (so about 200 slots were not filled).
Oddly enough, even after 200 slots being left blank, the ratio of Romanoff to Bennet to Uncommitted delegates stayed about the same as the raw vote in the preference polls: 61% Romanoff, 34% Bennet, 5% Uncommitted.
I think the first main ones start on the 3rd
The percentage based on turnout and the percentage of delegates attained are getting mixed up in some of these assessments. They are two very different things.
I can see AR’s camp getting into spinning these numbers, comparing total caucus turnout to percentage of delegates.
The process is run by Romanoff supporters; people who have been going to JJ dinners for the last 20 years and attending every HD meeting.
They probably got a higher percentage of delegates than overall turnout numbers reveal because knowledge of the caucus process is something party folks have.
In raw votes (turnout) statewide Romanoff lead roughly 52-42 (with the remaing 6% being uncommitted). So far the delegate count is runing roughly 53% for Romanoff, based the numbers given in the original post in this thread. Since some of this comes from media reports, there is always a question of what was actually being reported. The remaining 47% would be the combination of Bennet and Uncommitted and I do not have enough details to say if Uncommitted got delegates or not.
In Denver, the raw vote was 61-35-4 Romanoff-Bennet-Uncommitted and the delegate count to County Assembly is 61-34-5, so also very closely matching overall vote to delegates.
Except, Dan, that you are comparing statewide results with results from those specific counties. That’s apples and oranges. You need to compare the raw votes in those counties on caucus night with the delegate count coming out of the assemblies in those counties. That is a much more accurate depiction of what is happening, I think.
In the end, it is the state delegates that make the choice for the primary ballot.
So far we have about 1/8 of those delegates assigned and the numbers are still tracking closely to what the statewide raw vote numbers were. Each county will, or course, have it plusses and minuses as the jockeying between raw votes and delegates goes through the process.
I was trying to show how the end-result pie was looking, not the measurements of all the ingredients that go into the making of it.
I think, if it reflects anything, it more likely that it reflects the relative levels of personal commitment for the two candidates. If the people selected as delegates or alternates and fail to show up to the county assembly the percentages change.
The other effect is the random walk effect of the method of rounding to a whole number. Take, for example, a group of 17 people who get four delegates. If 10 are for A that’s 58.8% and short of the approximately 62.5% needed for three delegates. If on the other hand 11 were for A that’s 64.7% and just barely over the percentage needed if there are just two candidates. So there is a random effect that will increase or decrease a candidate’s number of delegates a bit at each stage. If he’s lucky he’ll only go up, but more likely once all the numbers are in the randomness will be smoothed out.
So what does this mean? Too soon to say, really. If delegates pledged to Romanoff, like me, don’t show up in Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, El Paso, Jefferson, and Pueblo due to being discouraged Bennet could still rise. And the converse could also be true. Does this mean anything? It could mean an ‘extra’ percent or two in the primary for whoever gets top line, but that won’t matter unless something bad comes out about Bennet or Romanoff finds a much more compelling message.
Personally I’m pledged for Romanoff and I will vote for him, but I am thinking given his performance in the caucuses that it may be time for us to to come together around Bennet.
I like it.
So Matthew, you think that his performance at the caucus was underwhelming?
The AR camp has some serious spin on this caucus showing. I expect him to gain delegates in most of the county assemblies and take top line. His emails about how “we gained 15 points at so and so assembly” have been echoed by a lot of his supporters as of late.
Personally, I think we are repeating Miles/Salazar history.
I’m curious about your thoughts about the “gathering around Bennet” stuff. Is it AR’s messaging that is your concern?
Romanoff 5 delegates
Bennet 1 delegate