This is a picture I took yesterday of Gerald McEntee, the head of the powerful AFSCME labor union, at the closing Clinton rally. The sign he's holding says 'Culinary Workers for Clinton', and it's a dig at the leaders of the Culinary Workers, who endorsed Obama and from what I hear from good sources used incredibly heavy handed tactics to encourage their members to caucus for Obama.
At the caucus I was at, two AFSCME organizers were actually out-organizing the Culinary Workers among their own members, a sign of just how badly the Obama labor camp played their hand. Not only did the union not deliver their members, but it's probable that the aggressive tactics, which included things like explaining to members they should caucus for Obama or not show up at all, backfired and drove up support for Clinton. Remember, Clinton tried to get the strip caucuses canceled in a lawsuit, but ended up winning the strip casinos anyway, including New York New York.
While at first the Obama supporters were loud and seemed coherent, at a certain moment the number of Clinton supporters holding signs that said 'I support the union, I support Hillary', signs paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign, were suddenly the majority. One guy was saying 'the union is lying, it's not sixty thousand for Obama', and while most of the workers I tried to speak with couldn't speak English, they were clearly excited to be at the caucus and happy to back Clinton.
If I had known what McEntee was trying to say last night, I would have blogged it a bit differently. The story here is huge turnout, good organizing, and a new caucus system that was simply overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to participate. The Nevada Democratic Party needed around 1700 new precinct chairs for the caucuses, since there's no culture of caucusing in the state on such a scale. The party recruited them, and didn't force campaign neutrality on the chairs. It's possible this is because the party is in bed with Clinton, or it's possible that party leaders just didn't think they could get enough chairs to staff the caucuses and didn't want to turn away qualified chairs. Much of the fighting over rules and claims of voter irregularities can be chalked up to mistakes and a complicated system with over a hundred thousand participants and thousands of managers new to the process.
The central claim of the Clinton camp is that the Obama labor people were intimidating members. The central claim of the Obama camp is that Clinton-affiliated chairs were telling their people to show up at 11:30 and then shutting doors to caucus-goers at 11:30 instead of 12. Aside from the fact that party rules conflict with each other on this point, many of the caucus goers really wanted the event to start and end quickly, because they were working. In the middle of the caucus I attended, about a third of the room emptied out because of a shift change (their votes had been counted). In other words, there were good reasons to shut the doors at 11:30.
Anyway, I don't buy the claims of the Obama campaign that there was voter suppression going on, and I do think that the Culinary workers were pressuring their members to vote for Obama. Unfortunately for them, AFSCME just flat out beat them at their own game.
UPDATE: My earlier supposition about John Edwards seems to be what happened, at least in Nevada.
I believe John Edwards's situation is similar to that of a third party candidate working for viability. Voters considering their choices usually do not use their votes to 'send a message' but to pick a winner, so unless a third party candidate can prove they could possibly win an election, usually support for that candidate will collapse.
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