When I pulled out of the high school parking lot last Tuesday night, leaving the GOP precinct caucus and heading to the DFL caucus, I had the feeling I was missing something important.
At the middle school, I followed KDWA reporter Kristi Myre into the caucus, and it struck me then that we were almost certainly two of the only people in town who would have seen both meetings.
Due to the dueling caucus structure, the opportunity cost of going to one by definition meant attendees would never see both.
And that bothered me.
It bothered me even before I heard the DFL candidate for House District 41B Jen Fox speak to some of the same issues as her GOP counterparts. Affordability was a key issue across both caucuses.
“The city council talked last night about assessments on roads again and that has just become so hard with this almost 200% increase in water for Hastings residents, it’s inconceivable,” said Fox.
“Everybody wonders, why are my property taxes so high? Why is everything getting so expensive?” said Rep. Tom Dippel from a podium in the high school commons.
The rising costs of property taxes, groceries, rent, transportation, electricity and here in Hastings especially, water—all make it hard for Minnesotans to make ends meet.
It is an issue that we all agree is a serious problem.
I wonder how many of us know we are all talking about it together, apart?
Even more granular issues were identical across the caucuses, especially at the local level.
I spoke with first-time caucus attendee Rochelle McDonald who came to the GOP caucus explicitly to speak about the Manufactured Home Resident’s Bill of Rights. McDonald is a resident of Three Rivers and has been deeply affected by the rising lot rent there.
Halfway through the resolution period at the DFL caucus, site organizer Mary Nehring, also a resident at Three Rivers, took up the microphone to speak about that very same issue.
“My rent when Haven Homes bought the park was $425. My rent today is $850 and that’s five years. It’s rapidly becoming unaffordable,” said Nehring.
Nehring organized a meeting with legislators last November to raise awareness about the issue of rising lot rent and the Manufactured Home Resident’s Bill of Rights.
And after listening to Nehring, I thought about McDonald.
Wouldn’t it have been better for both if they had the opportunity to attend caucuses together?
Wouldn’t it have been more productive not just for voters, but for the parties to show how this issue cuts across political lines?
And the more I thought about it, the more our caucus structure bothered me.
I was able to catch speeches from several local candidates as they jumped between caucuses in their districts, rushing one to the next.
Wouldn’t it have been better for candidates if the two parties’ caucuses didn’t overlap?
Wouldn’t they have reached more people?
I wonder how many attendees of the Hastings DFL precinct caucus were swayed to vote for Jen Fox after she spoke there. I doubt many. I assume many—if not most – had already made up their minds. They self-selected to their party’s caucus after all.
I expect the same thing happened at the GOP Precinct Caucus for Will Beck the GOP candidate for House District 41B.
What then, is the point?
Wouldn’t the opportunity to hear from local candidates from both major parties be better for undecided voters, the very swing voters that American politics is seemingly built around?
Instead, the caucus system emphasizes self-selection and polarization.
By the very structure, you cannot go to both, even if both caucuses are talking about the same issue. But because of that structure, voters would never know if that were the case.
Caucuses are in part, an organizing exercise for political parties. Site organizers for both the GOP and DFL caucuses spoke to defining success of the event by attendance and finding new community members who wanted to become involved in local politics.
In that sense, caucuses are built for political parties explicitly over voters’ interests.
Because if they were really about helping people become aware of local issues, we wouldn’t force voters to choose party allegiance over the ability to learn more about their local candidates and hear from more of their neighbors.
If caucuses were really about the issues important to local voters, Nehring and McDonald would have been able to speak last Tuesday night.
Voters will get future opportunities to hear from both candidates, but so often those forums are combative. They are debates or forums with candidates talking past each other, structures made to contrast candidates.
And yet here they were talking about the same issues and even some of the same solutions.
I’m not trying to say that both parties are the same. It was apparent even from the framing of these issues, especially around affordability, that the methods sought to fix this problem differed radically party to party.
Just that both caucuses highlighted some of the same issues. Similar problems animated residents and neighbors to come out to seek answers and to hear how others were affected by them.
But due to the caucus structure, it would be understandable to walk away from a caucus and not know that the other side of the aisle was affected by those same issues and potentially even sought the same answer, as was the case with the Manufactured Home Resident’s Bill of Rights.
I still wish I had been able to speak with the residents who came early to the DFL caucus. I wish I would have been able to stay later to listen to more of the resolutions coming out of the GOP caucus.
In a different world, I would have come an hour early to both and stayed late. In that world maybe I would have seen some of the same faces at each caucus, heard Nehring and McDonald talk.
Instead, I came early to one and stayed late to the other.
And that bothers me.
Because wouldn’t we be better together?