Last night, counties and wards across Missouri held meetings to elect delegates to the Congressional district conventions.  This is my report of the meeting from Clinton County, Missouri, where we elected 2 Obama delegates and 2 Clinton delegates (plus alternates) to the 6th Congressional District convention.

First, a little background on Clinton County.  Traditionally, it is Democratic territory.  All of the County office-holders are Democratic, and we typically vote for all the Democratic State and Federal candidates in contested elections (although Bush won Clinton County in 2004–ugh).  So although we typically go D, we will (unfortunately) vote R on occasion.  But on the other hand, winning Clinton County doesn’t guarantee the Democratic candidate victory state-wide–we just don’t have that many votes here. In short, Clinton County is a necessary part of any successful, state-wide Democratic candidate’s electoral success.  If you can’t win in Clinton County, you probably can’t win state-wide.

Anyway, back to last night’s meeting.  All told, we had about 65 attendees, split equally between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton.  This seems pretty good to me, as the county population is about 20,000.  I wasn’t around for the 2004 meetings, but I was told that the turnout last night was double or triple the turnout from four years ago.  I was on the Obama side, and the election of delegates was by acclimation–no contested positions at all.  We got in there, we voted, and we were done by 7:50.