Now that was a Caucus!

All of us are still marveling at how well this week's Caucus turned out. So many people attended that several volunteers are still hard at work entering all the data. It's quite obvious that the political landscape of Douglas County is changing. Here are the numbers we have so far:

5303 voted in the presidential poll. (Compare to 4951 in the Republican poll!)

Our Central Committee now has 204 Precinct Committee People and 136 Alternates. Even Nighthawk and Deckers now have PCPs!

We signed up 407 election judges.

716 people were elected to be Delegates and Alternates to the County Assembly and Convention.

All of these numbers are astronomically bigger than we have ever seen before in Douglas County. What is really amazing is the change in the demographic makeup of the county's active Democrats. You can see it in this photo, as well as in the data. Far more young people are participating, and we have far more ethnic diversity than ever before.

I'm not sure anyone really believed that so many people would go out on a bitterly cold evening to spend two whole hours at a political party meeting. In spite of the unexpectedly huge crowds, there were very few complaints: a shortage of parking in a couple of locations, and about 3% of participants were ineligible to vote because of problems with their registration. Even though many had to stand for two hours because of a shortage of chairs, practically everyone had fun.

All this great news also presents some challenges. We have to scale up our operations to serve a much larger group of active Democrats. We have to find ways to turn this one evening of participation into long-term community engagement, especially for younger people. We're going to need more food at our meetings! These are the kinds of problems we love to have, and fortunately we have a huge number of creative, newly active Democrats to help us move forward.