BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
The DFL’s Fifth Congressional District Convention was held at South High School on Saturday, May 7. A little over 200 delegates from a total of 230 precincts attended. As a Bernie Sanders pledged alternate, I got upgraded to delegate just before lunch time when one of the other Sanders delegates had to leave.
The convention was called to order at 10:35. The supposed main business of the convention only took about 60 seconds—the endorsement of Keith Ellison as candidate (incumbent) for 5th District Congressperson. And that 60 seconds included all of us old ones struggling to our feet twice in that short time for standing ovations. We had a really prime example of one of Ellison’s famously policy-wonky speeches, on getting out the vote, and how the 5th CD has blasted its way to the top in voter turnout and “saved the bacon” of several prominent Democrats who lost the rest of the state, but still won because they won so-o-o-o-o big in CD 5.
But the real main business of the convention, the selection of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25 through 28, was purposely put off to the last, despite a failed attempt to suspend the rules and move it up ahead of the time-consuming business of other elections and selections. It was pretty near 5 p.m. when we finally turned to national delegate selection. CD5 has nine delegates, and the presidential preference numbers from our 230 precinct caucuses broke that down to Sanders – 6, Clinton – 3, Uncommitted – zero. There were a handful of uncommitteds among the 197 delegates left in the room at that point, and they had to either choose a candidate or go home.
There were just a tad over 100 of us left in the room to select the six Sanders delegates, as the approximately 90 Clinton-committed delegates went out into the dining hall. We had a bit of a barney over whether to go with speeches and vote or walking subcaucus. For the six spots, there were 50+ delegates who had filled out forms by the deadline to run for national delegate. I decided to consult with Faith, a more experienced DFL-er who learned all this stuff at her father’s knee (my own father is, sadly, a Republican). She said “subcaucus,” so I voted accordingly. Then a newby (ish) delegate moved to do two separate rounds of subcaucusing, one for women and one for men, in order to make the gender-balance easier (or at least that’s what he claimed). Again I consulted Faith and she snorted and said it would make it insanely harder, not easier. In any case, it was defeated. A total of 23 subcaucuses were nominated, but amazingly (exhaustion can be such a motivator) it only took a single walk to get down to three viable subcaucuses with no leftovers. The groups could select one, two and three delegates respectively. I was in the one that selected three. Here are all the results:
For Clinton – Husniyah Dent Bradley, Raynad Yu and Ali Rodway.
For Sanders – Alexis Pennie. Florkime Paye, Melissa Olson, Caroline Hooper, Christopher Meyer and Travis Thompson.
