veiled4allah: caucus results

Kucinich came in third in Washington, ahead of Edwards and Clark. I was surprised at Edwards's strong showing because he has no organization in the state. By contrast, Clark has a pretty good grassroots organization here. I guess that Edwards benefitted from more positive media than Clark did. And that makes Kucinich's finish even more impressive.

He gets practically no national media coverage and the local coverage here has been pretty lousy. He rallied 1300 in Seattle on Wednesday but half the news stories didn't even mention the event and those that did featured pictures from the mosque visit instead of the rally, thus giving no real idea of the level of support Kucinich has here. And yet Kucinich beat media darling Edwards.

The results need to be read with care. They don't list the number of voters, they list the number of delegates. In order for a candidate to get a delegate, they have to have at least 15% support in that precinct.

In Iowa, Kucinich had 4% support, according to entrance polling, but only got 1% of the delegates, because of this 15% rule. There's no entrance polling for Washington, but we can be pretty sure that his support is somewhat higher than the 8% of the delegates figure.

Until quite recently, Washington was Fortress Dean. Nobody thought it was even going to be close. In that context, 30% of the delegates, 20% behind Kerry, is not a good result at all.

Washington is Kucinich's best showing yet by far. I am really thrilled with it and proud of our campaign organization in the state since (as noted above) we accomplished this almost entirely through grassroots activism and not through the media.

Oh, and yes, Washington is a very liberal state and has been since the earliest days. It was once described as "the Soviet of Washington" it's so far left, lol. Our conservatives are very conservative and like in most other parts of the country, the rural areas tend to be conservative. But they don't have the population to match the Soviet of Seattle.

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