The media mostly misinterpreted the caucus results for both parties in Washington State's caucuses on Saturday. You can't entirely blame them. Even party activists were confused. And shortly you are going to hear about further confusion over Washington State's presidential primary that follows next week, February 19. Complications begin with the fact that the Republicans and Democrats are running different, though related, delegate selection systems.

Let's start with the primary that will be held a week from tomorrow. Since Washington is moving to a nearly-all-absentee ballot operation in all elections, voters already have received--and many have cast--those ballots. Nothing is on most of them but the presidential primary choices. (The options, by the way,include candidates who have now quit the race, including John Edwards on theDemocratic side, for example, and Rudy Giuliani on the Republican, or, in the case of Mitt Romney, a candidate who has "suspended" his race.)

Independents can participate in the presidential primary in Washington, but to do so they have to declare a party preference. That means they no longer are really "independents", doesn't it? Some partisans who would like to vote for a person in the other party (a person who considers himself a Republican but would like to vote for Obama, for example) probably will be deterred by the prospect of recording themselves as members of a party with which they really don't identify. After all, both parties will have access to how voters have identified themselves, meaning that the state now has de facto party registration.

Some voters, rebelling against this pressure to settle on a party, have refused to list their party identification and have voted anyhow. Those ballots will be ignored, and voters who have voted already and have learned that they wasted their ballot are not happy. (They should have read the fine print.)

Further confusion: The Republican primary results will count--though only for 19
out of the state's allotted 40 national delegates. The statewide winner of the GOP primary will get ten of those 19, while another nine will be assigned--one each--to the winner within the confines of each of the state's nine Congressional districts. So, those nine could be the same as the statewide winner, or somewhat different.

As for the Democrats, the party authorities will surely make records of how the individual primary voters identify themselves by party, but the actual presidential vote outcome will have no binding status in selection of national convention delegates. This already is another cause of dismay among voters who, for whatever reason, didn't want to--or couldn't--attend the caucuses last Saturday and now feel abandoned and ignored. (Remember, only the Democrats, not the Republicans, fail to select delegates from the primary process.)

Meantime, with the caucus results from last Saturday, we have the spectacle of either real or feigned outrage from Huckabee supporters who claim that the Washington Republican Party chairman, Luke Esser, awarded the caucus victory to McCain before counting all the votes. Actually, all he did was give a preliminary result when the volunteer counters reached 87% statewide and wanted to quit for the night. The vote count continued the next day, but didn't change anything.

But confusion again was understandable. Even the participants at the Republican caucuses probably were perplexed. Upon entering, each participant registered a preference for president. Technically, it didn't matter much, because those votes
haven't even been counted and don't factor into what delegates will ultimately go to the national convention in St. Paul this summer. What was counted was the outcome of the subsequent decision by attendees; namely, the choice of the delegates to move to the next level of selection, the county GOP conventions that will be held in March and April. It was the total of those delegates' presidential choices that the party chairman cited in saying that McCain had "won". In fact, he was stating a contingent political reality, but not necessarily a permanent one. Not only were all the delegates votes not tabulated at the time he made the statement (the last few are being counted now), but, also, the delegates are free to change their minds before the county conventions. And delegates selected at the county convention could be differently committed at the state convention.

At the state convention, moreover, the 18 national party convention delegates that are to be selected solely through the caucus/convention process might be all pledged to one candidate, or allotted by some proportional formula arrived at then.

Finally, the Republicans in Washington allot three automatic delegate votes to the state party chairman and the party's national committeeman and committeewoman, thus giving the delegation 40 votes total.

The precinct caucuses showed a slight McCain edge over Huckabee (25% to 24%), with Ron Paul a close third, with 21%, and another 17% for Romney, and the rest scattered or uncommited. It is possible, therefore, that there will be many changes of position before the state convention meets in May, three months from now. Overall, at this point in the delegate selection process you would want to be McCain, not someone else, but it is still not at all certain how the Washington delegation to the national convention will be configured.

Washington State Democrats, meanwhile, will follow roughly the same process, but
will award all the national delegates by the caucus system, filtered through
county and state conventions, and will exclude any official consideration (as I
say still again) of next week's presidential primary results. Since Obama won the caucuses convincingly, I think it is clear that he will get the lion's share of delegates to the national convention in Denver. But the exact breakdown is still unclear.

There. If there are any questions, raise your hand.

Please! Not all at once!