You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Delegates to the DNC are chosen by Congressional district. Each district is allocated a number of delegates based on how many registered democrats there are in that district. I live in CA-48 (Issa), which means I was already starting with a huge disadvantage. Where many districts in CA were allocated 9-10 delegates, CA-48, being the ruby red hellhole that it is, only has 5, 3 of which have to be women and 2 have to be other than women (male and/or non-binary)
In January, the CA Democratic Party put out a call for delegate candidates. Once that deadline closed (mid-March), the list was sent to the Biden campaign, who had the final say of who would be allowed on the ballot. Do not ask me their decision process, I don’t know it. I do know a few people who were excluded from the ballot by the campaign, though. I doubt I’ll ever know what their criteria were, but I made the cut.
The next step was getting Democrats in my district to request a ballot. In the old days, all of this was done in-person on a caucus day in April, but we’re in the digital age, so none of that archaic crap goes anymore. I had approximately 3 weeks to whip friends and other democrats in my district to get off their asses, go to a website, and sign up to receive a ballot…which wouldn’t come until 2 weeks AFTER that.
As you can imagine, it’s like begging for crumbs on the internet streets, not only to first get people to request a ballot, then two weeks later, get them to actually check their email and vote.
One little wrinkle: the Wednesday before the ballots were sent out, stupid Gavin fucking Newsom’s team sent out an email to all the ballot recipients giving his “recommendation,” which was ONE person from Temecula (where I have almost zero connections). There are many problems with this:
- Most political endorsements are arrived at via a process where the candidates fill out a questionnaire, talk to the endorsing organization, etc. This did not happen.
- The person chosen was from the red-headed stepchild area of the district. only about 20% of CA-48 is in Riverside County, and yet, that’s the person he chose.
- How the fuck did his team have the entire list of voters, when that info was NOT available to the candidates. We had no chance to whip votes. Instead, I just had to hope and pray that my social media posting in as many facebook groups as I could find would get me over the line.
As expected, Newsom’s person ended up getting the most votes. I got 3rd, but it was enough to get me there.
So I managed to avoid not one but TWO thumbs on the scale and still get one of the delegate seats. As you can expect, I’m super excited!
