Another reminder; Tuesday is Caucus night in Minnesota.

“But Mitch – I’ve never been to a precinct caucus!”

Well, it’s interesting, and you should try it. You go to wherever you’re supposed to be – usually a school, library or other community center – and you find your precinct and grab a seat with your neighbors.  There’s some precinct business to take care of, and then you get down to the stuff we all really come for:

• Endorsing candidates, although this doesn’t usually happen at precinct caucuses.
• Electing delegates to the BPOU (Legislative District) conventions.  This is important; these are the people who will endorse the candidates for the Legislature, and vote for delegates for later conventions.
• Voting in any straw polls that might be held (might be one for governor, but I’m not sure about this year)
• Resolutions.  You can suggest resolutions to be included in the state party platform, campaign for ’em, and get ’em adopted to get sent to the BPOU conventions.  If your resolution gets enough traction, it can become part of the platform…

The important thing is, caucuses matter.  And when I say “matter”, I add “party politics is about persistence more than passion”.   The last round of major caucuses, two years ago, saw a huge outpouring of support for Ron Paul, which indirectly changed a lot of things about the way the party works, and led the party into a good position as re the whole Tea Party movement – but changing any party is a matter of showing up, year in and year out, and convincing people that change needs to happen.  So every time you go to the caucuses, you affect the way the party works – perhaps not as much as you want it to, but every bit matters eventually.

Anyway – hope to see you there on Tuesday!

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 6:04 am and is filed under MNGOP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.