It should have been the Maine Democratic Party’s finest hour.
The Feb. 10 presidential caucus drew a massive turnout. Thousands of party newcomers — young people, independents and dissatisfied Republicans — swamped caucus sites, eager to play a part in the selection of the next leader of the free world, and the ejection of the policies of the current one.
Instead, many were exposed to the shameful reality of our state’s caucus system, a system designed to discourage broad participation and to ensure the popular vote has little effect on the selection of presidential nominees.
Portland High School — the only caucus site for Maine’s largest city and principal seaport — was overwhelmed by a turnout of 4,000, less than twice the number who showed up for the 2004 caucus. Most participants waited in a snowstorm for more than two hours just to get into the building, only to spend one to two hours in line to register. Hundreds were advised to fill out impromptu absentee ballots and leave, as the caucus rooms were said to be full. Those who took this advice had trouble even leaving the building, as the front entrances were closed, there were few signs and scant volunteers available to direct them, and every passage was choked with people waiting in competing lines.
The scene was both frustrating and anxious, as it was obvious that an orderly escape in the event of an emergency would be impossible. Still, most of the wet, shivering people in the crowd bore it all with grace and patience, eager to have their voices heard.
But here’s the kicker: under the arcane delegate-allocation system set up by the Maine Democrats, those voters’ voices weren’t really heard at all.
Neither the strong turnout nor the popular vote mattered on that Sunday, because the caucus system awards delegates town by town based on a formula that has nothing to do with caucus turnout or the population of the communities in question.
It’s like the Electoral College system, only worse. On Feb. 10, there were, in effect, more than 400 separate elections, one for each town or city precinct. The number of delegates awarded in each of these contests was preset based on an irrelevant standard: the number of voters who cast a ballot for John Baldacci in 2006. It didn’t matter whether one person or 5,000 showed up at a given caucus last Sunday — the number of delegates was already set in stone.
The result was a travesty that made a mockery of the notion of the one-person, one-vote ideal.
Portland got one delegate for every 18.5 voters who stood in line at Portland High, while those in Bangor got one for every 10.5 participants. In four rural towns (Gilead, La Grange, Osborn, and Woodville), only one voter showed up, and each was awarded a delegate of their own. That meant each of those participants’ votes had 27 times the weight of those cast by caucus-goers in Camden or on Long Island in Casco Bay, where enthusiasm for Barack Obama was far greater than for Gov. Baldacci.
This arbitrary pattern extended to other islands as well. Islesboro voters had the least influence in the state, with 30 voters per allocated delegate. Vinalhaven (25-1) and North Haven (22-1) also fared poorly, and Isle au Haut (14-1) and Swan’s Island (11-1) in between. Matinicus fared best, its three democratic voters getting a delegate of their own and, in the process, 30 times the per capita influence of their Islesboro counterparts.
This situation has gone completely unreported in Maine’s media, and is poorly understood even within the Democratic Party itself. House Speaker Glenn Cummings (D-Portland) said he hadn’t been aware of the delegate-allocation problem until this reporter brought it to his attention, but he found it troubling. “If you do it just by who wins, precinct-by-precinct, then you’re not getting a sense of what the general electorate wants,” he said. “There may be a misalignment between the will of the party populists and the allocation of delegates.”
“In 2000, the country had a close race for president and had to confront the Electoral College system for the first time, and this is, in many ways, similar,” said Arden Manning, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, whose rules committee created the flawed system. “Even the smallest town gets at least one delegate, and that does give smaller towns more say in the results.”
Manning said the party does not collect or retain the actual town-by-town vote tallies. Those tallies are the only figures that would allow one to determine if the number of delegates allocated to each candidate would have differed had they had been allocated under a popular vote system, as would be the case in a primary election.
Then there’s the matter of superdelegates, which the Democratic National Committee (DNC) introduced into the nomination process after the 1980 election, to allow party officials to overrule the will of ordinary voters. The 44,300 Mainers who participated in caucuses on Sunday select a total of 24 delegates. The state’s other 10 delegates can support whichever presidential nominee they like, without reference to the will of voters.
Under this baldly undemocratic procedure, 10 Mainers – Gov. Baldacci; Rep. Tom Allen; Rep. Mike Michaud; former Gov. Ken Curtis; state DNC officials Sam Spencer and Rita Moran; state party officials Marianne Stevens, Jennifer DeChant and John Knuston, and a yet-to-be-named person chosen by Knuston — have each been given electoral power equivalent to 1,847 Mainers who stood in the cold last Sunday.
“In terms of democracy,” Speaker Cummings said, “there’s a potential for a miscarriage of justice there.”
Indeed, some superdelegates committed to support a particular candidate before the caucus even took place, including Gov. Baldacci, who is supporting Hillary Clinton.
The superdelegate issue wouldn’t go away if Mainers returned to a primary system, but voter turnout would improve dramatically.
Proponents of the caucus system say it encourages face-to-face contact and voter contemplation, humanizing the electoral process and helping to build party contacts. “People these days have a terrific need for community that they find very hard to satisfy,” says Sive Neilan, chair of the Portland Democratic Committee. “The caucus is a very community- and people-oriented process.”
But those benefits come at a terrible price in participation, since caucuses have less flexible hours and are more time-consuming for those with family or employment obligations. Democrats have been celebrating the supposed “record turnout” on Feb. 10. In fact, a third fewer people attended Sunday’s caucus than voted in the far less exciting contest between Al Gore and Bill Bradley in 2000, when the Democrats still held primaries.
For Maine Republicans, the system is even worse. Participants in their Feb. 1 caucus had no formal influence over the selection of their party’s presidential nominee whatsoever.
Under Maine Republican Party rules, none of the state’s 21 delegates are bound to observe the caucus results. Though 18 of them are elected by delegates to the party’s state convention, all of them are, in effect, superdelegates, able to vote for whichever presidential nominee they’d like.
“There are many people who feel, in regards to presidential preference, that they don’t have a voice – and, essentially, they don’t,” said Julie Ann O’Brien, executive director of the Maine Republican Party. “After the dust has settled, I think there should be a discussion within and between the two parties as to whether we should go back to primaries.”
Christian Potholm, professor of government at Bowdoin College, agrees. “I personally prefer a situation where people go into a voting booth and vote for somebody and at the end of the day you add up everybody’s vote and whoever won is the winner,” he says. “Caucuses just don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
The caucus system — which was imposed on both parties by the Democrat-controlled state legislature in 2003 — should be done away with before the next election cycle. If political parties want to show they’re committed to the democratic process, they should dispense with any rules and procedures that serve to subvert it, both here in Maine and in the country at large.
— Colin Woodard is author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and The Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier. He can be found in Portland or at www.colinwoodard.com.