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Ok first of all, let me say….”Holy Crap!”. No seriously.

Ok let me preface this post by saying I’m writing it at 2 am, and that’s only because I JUST got home. After our caucuses a bunch of us went out for a few drinks afterwards to decompress and talk over how things went. So bear with me if this post is a bit disjointed….and it’s not from too many drinks. More from just too many things happening in a short amount of time.

Ok our committee had planned for two to three times as many people as we normally get. We figured that was safe. Not. Even. Close. We usually get 300, and I know for a fact we were well over a thousand. We were never able to get them all in one place at one time. Had the fire marshall showed up, no way we wouldn’t have violated every fire code written.

Planned on starting everyone out in the auditorium to do the pledge, a few speeches and then explain how things were going to work. That was quickly abandoned as the auditorium was filled, then our overflow space in the cafeteria was filled and then our backup overflow was filled, and we still had a line a block long going out the door.

As we tried to create some order of the chaos, it was easy to get sidetracked. I was convening one of our precincts so I had to get to one of the precinct rooms, so eventually I just had to beg off to get there. As I walked to my room, where a room of near 100 people was waiting for me, I tried to think of what to say as I was already late. I tried to come up with my apology speech.

That it occurred to me….why am I apologizing? Insanely large turnout is a good thing right?? Don’t we usually complain about people not wanting to get involved?!??! So I joined my caucus and proceeded to get the evening started. Fortunately most people, while originally annoyed at the large crowds, quickly came around and we were able to have a fairly enjoyable event.

For anyone interested in the results of our caucus, our BPOU presidential results can be found here, broken down by precinct. FYI, I was in charge of Apple Valley, Precinct 2. When I first got our totals for my precinct I figured we were an exception. Then when I collected and reported the totals to the state later in the evening I saw that across our BPOU the results were similar. Then I saw on the news that across the state we were fairly standard.

Not what I expected. I expected McCain and Romney to be neck-and-neck. Instead Romney came away with virtually half the vote, and Paul, McCain and Huckabee almost evenly splitting the rest.

In the end, however, is that there were just a massive number of people at the caucus. Never in my my wildest dreams would I have thought we could get that amount of people to show up. What was even more encouraging were the number of people in my precinct that wanted to get involved more. And this was true across our BPOU. Normally it’s a very small fraction of people that get involved. And while it’s still a minority for us, it’s a substantial minority. I hope it plays out as well as it did tonite.

When I talked to people at the state party tonite, I had a chance to find out how things were going across the state. So I think I can speak with fairly decent authority to all caucus goers in Minnesota. So on that note let me state, thank you for showing up and we hope you enjoyed the experience and wish to stay involved. Inevitably there were some people that did not enjoy the crowds, the overflow rooms and the lines, to those I apologize, but when it really comes down to it, a very active democracy is a good thing.

Let’s keep up the energy moving into November people.

NOTE : Ok, I just got a chance to look at the results from around the country. McCain is running away with it. That is…..well, very depressing. Minnesota is the sane one for once apparently. However, there is a silver lining in this cloud. McCain looks pretty likely to take the Republican nomination. However, Obama and Clinton are still at a virtual deadlock. Which means while the Republicans are likely to get a candidate fairly shortly, the Democrats are almost guaranteed to have a brokered convention.

That is a GOOD thing. I can’t find them at the moment (heh! It’s 2:30 in the blessed AM, give me a break!), but basically the historical date is encouraging for us GOPers. The party that picks it’s candidate first is at a great advantage over the other party. And although it looked impossible just two months ago, it appears as if the GOP will have it’s candidate many months before the Democrats.

So we got that going for us. Which is nice.

NOTE2 : Apparently Romney won North Dakotans too….all two of them.