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Dem County chair: Beware cable news reports, pundits calling election
John Cullar, chairman of the McLennan County Democratic Party, said caucus goers should ignore reports on MSNBC that say that the polls in Texas will close at 9 p.m.
That’s only in El Paso and the polls will close at the regular time in Central Texas, which is 7 p.m., Cullar said. And Waco’s Democratic Party’s precinct conventions, also called caucuses, will be held at 7:15 p.m. or as soon as the last person in line to vote has cast his or her ballot, he said.
It will also be interesting to see how the pundits on national television try to explain the outcome of Texas’ primary-caucus hybrid election system. Out of the 228 delegates up for grabs in Texas 126 will be determined based on the primary vote. Another 67 will be based on the results of the caucuses held at precinct, county and state conventions.
The Texas Democratic Party has never tried to collect all of the results of the precinct conventions on election day, Cullar said. And because the precinct chairmen have until Friday to send in the caucus results to the state party, it could be days before the state has a handle on who won the most delegates.
“It is just guess work,” he said. “The (precinct convention) is the first step and you really can’t tell from that.”
But that is not not going to stop candidates from declaring victory tonight, Cullar said.
“(The candidates) want an immediate spin on what is going on,” he said.
The delegates who are elected at the precinct conventions can change their preference for presidential candidates at the county and state conventions, Cullar said. So the final results on the delegate counts won’t be official until the state convention in early June, he said.
But the campaigns of Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are putting pressure on state and local county Democratic officials to produce at least a preliminary determination on who won the most delegates, Cullar said.
The Texas Democratic Party is asking precinct chairmen to call in results so they can be posted on the state party’s Web site tonight.
“We expect some precinct conventions to not take any longer than an hour, but some may be taking up to two or three hours,” said Hector Nieto, a state party spokesman. “It’s just a matter of communicating with these precincts and how they fast they can get the results back to us.”
Cullar said he is encouraging precinct chairmen to turn their results in tonight. But he said it remains unclear when the results of the caucuses will be known.
And how quick the results come in might depend on the organization of the party, which often varies in rural and urban areas, Cullar said.
“It is going to be impossible to tell the percentages until a day or two,” he said.
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