Brian’s Utah Weblog

Democratic National Convention delegates fall into many categories — DNC members, pledged and unpledged elected officials, pledged district and at large delegates, alternates, and add-on delegates. Nearly the last of these to be picked in most states are the add-on delegates. Intended to give statewide winners a boost and balance affirmative action goals, the add-on delegates are chosen by different methods in each state. Some states allow the Democratic Party executive committee to choose them while others defer to the body of state delegates or central committee. In Utah we used to allow the party chair to hand pick our single add-on delegate all by himself.

This year we are doing something different. The district level delegates are choosing our add-on at the state convention on May 9th. Last week a similar process led to serious problems in D.C.

Add-on delegates are technically superdelegates and therefore not required to pledge support to any candidate or to make any effort to follow the returns of primaries in their states or districts.

The District Of Columbia Democratic Party was assigned two add-on delegates. The overwhelming majority of the Democratic State [sic] Committee, who choose the add-ons, favor Obama as did three fourths of primary voters in D.C. But dozens of Obama supporters signed up to run while many fewer Clinton supporters were set to divide up the votes of Clinton backers on the committee. The Obama campaign made an effort to pick just two, but couldn’t persuade enough candidates to drop out. In the end there were seven Obama candidates and two Clinton candidates. City Councilwoman and Obama supporter Yvette Alexander was elected but City Councilman and Clinton supporter Harry Thomas, Jr. managed to slip in past a divided Obama field by two votes.

Now Utah is facing the same situation.

Our district level delegates will be pledged to Obama 9-6 and they are the ones who will be caucusing to select the add-on. The caucus will take place after district delegates are elected but before pledged PLEO delegates are chosen on the evening of May 9th. But today’s list of candidates who have filed for the add-on slot (rules require it be a woman to balance the additional male pledged delegate):

• County Councilwoman Jenny Wilson (Clinton)
• Former State Party Treasurer Lisa Allcott (Clinton)
• Laura Arellano (Clinton)
• Judy Barnett (Clinton)
• Connie Nielson (Clinton)
• Lisa Wharton (Clinton)
• Senator Patricia Jones (Obama)
• Former Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini (Obama)
• Former State Party Chair Meghan Holbrook (Obama)
• Former Salt Lake Party Chair Megan Risbon (Obama)
• Lisa Ashman (Obama)
• Beth Holbrook (Obama)
• Tania Knauer (Obama)
• Jan Lovett (Obama)
• Jacqueline Orton (Obama)
• Gail M. Turpin (Obama)
• Josie Valdez (Obama)

Six Clinton and eleven Obama candidates. It’s worse than that, however. Jenny Wilson is justly popular for her work on her county council, was a close candidate for Salt Lake City mayor last year, and already represents about three fourths of the delegates that will be voting for the district delegate slot she is also running for. Wilson is likely to already be a delegate before the caucus to pick the add-on starts. The others are also running for other delegate slots but may or may not be picked for them.

The most likely field will have eight or nine Obama candidates running against four or five Clinton candidates. It’s fairly likely that smart and hardworking activist Lisa Allcott will be able to consolidate the Clinton support. I’ve seen her work on campaigns and she has the ability to do it. Meanwhile serious heavyweights like Pat Jones, Meghan Holbrook, nearly-state-party chair Jan Lovett, Megan Risbon, and others may be splitting the Obama votes. All it will take is some division in choice between the pledged Obama delegates to give Clinton a good chance at a big pickup in Utah on May 9th.

It’s just one more great reason to attend the Utah Democratic State Convention May 9th and 10th at the Cal Rampton Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City. Both delegates and citizen-spectators are welcome. There’s no announcement online yet. Call (801) 328-1212 for information. Your county convention makes great weekend fun, too.

I enjoyed another informative community council meeting tonight. If you’re in Salt Lake City or another city around Utah with community councils, you should go to your meetings, too. Salt Lake County has them in unincorporated areas, also.

My local council is Liberty-Wells and we did our usual business talking about grants, sidewalk repairs, neighborhood projects, emergency preparedness, law enforcement, and the like. Senator Scott McCoy (D-SLC) came, as he often does. We asked him about the school funding ‘equalization’ passed by the legislature that is going to cost Salt Lake Citizens $6 million this year and every year from now on — a permanent $50 annual tax increase on each home in the city.

Scott pointed to the Jordan split as the root cause why the suburbs managed to rob us for so much this year. Former councilman Dave Buhler once said it was like our neighbors getting a divorce and the judge ordering us to pay alimony to both of them.

There was one interesting point made by Senator McCoy at the meeting. Of the eleven senators representing Salt Lake County where the ‘equalization’ is happening SB 48 failed by 8-4. It was the rest of the Senate that absconded with our tax money (and not the the first time in the latest session, either). The Utah House saw a similar breakdown. This bill accounted for four of the partisan votes I cataloged earlier, and is typical of them.

Senators who represent Salt Lake County are in bold.

YEAS 18

• Bell
• Eastman
• Madsen
• Van Tassell
• Bramble
• Greiner
• Niederhauser
• Walker
• Buttars
• Hickman
• Peterson
• Valentine
• Christensen
• Jenkins
• Stephenson
• Dayton
• Knudson
• Stowell

NAYS 9

• Davis
• Goodfellow
• McCoy
• Dmitrich
• Jones
• Romero
• Fife
• Mayne
• Waddoups

ABSENT 2

• Hillyard
• Killpack

Contact the Utah Senate or House.

Update: I missed highlighting Senator Carlene Walker last night in a fit of optimism.  Go Karen Morgan.

The DNCC came to Salt Lake City to make us feel involved in the nominating convention in Denver coming up in August.

The event was at 11:00 AM on Friday but even so turnout was suspiciously packed with elected officials.  I counted two mayors and at least a dozen Utah Senators and Representatives along with three superdelegates sitting around the room.  Convention CEO Leah Daughtry came to town to make the presentation and I believe she’s a superdelegate, too, but not a Utahn so I’m not including her.  I wonder if all those officials are planning on running to be delegates to the convention.

Mayor Becker gave a wonderful speech about the evolution of progressive value in the western states and invited Denver conventioneers to come to Salt Lake to see a real mountain city, as long as they’re in the region.

A nice little event, but if the convention really wants to involve the people of the region, they need to run their meetings at an hour when people can come who aren’t just independent professionals, party functionaries, and elected officials.

Here’s a new tool I’ve been working on for data analysis stuffed full of political intrigue.

This is a chart of the 2008 Utah Senate. Each senator attracts the others based on how often the two agreed on non-unanimous roll call votes on bills in the 2008 General Session. If any two get too close on the chart compared to their voting behavior, they start to repel each other. Party and partisan affiliation are ignored except to color the squares.

I find it astonishing how stable the final results are. Margaret Dayton (R-Provo), Howard Stephenson (R-Draper), and Mark Madsen (R-Lehi) always drop out into the reptilian reactionary tail while Scott McCoy (D-SLC) and Ross Romero (D-SLC) elevate the progressive head of the body. Peter Knudsen (R-Brigham City) and Kevin Van Tassell (R-Vernal) sit in between the main body of Republicans and the Democrats.

See if you can make them match the seating chart like I did. Try dragging Romero into the middle of the Republicans and watch them part like the Red Sea. See if you can balance Margaret Dayton between Romero and McCoy so that she can’t go either way and gets stuck in an unstable equilibrium among the Democrats. Or just hit reset and watch how stable the results are.

Remember, I didn’t program any fixed end state into this chart. The patterns you find are the result of actual roll call behavior and a simple rule that draws closer senators who agree on each vote. If Mark Madsen always ends up in the same place on your chart, that’s his choice and not mine.

Click start to begin the simulation.

Note that this is an extract from a beta version of some new visualization tools and you can probably crash it. Also, unlike the rest of this site which is available under a Creative Commons license this post and the scripts and technologies used to build it are ©2008 Brian Earl Watkins all rights reserved and not available for Creative Commons licensing.

In 2006 Rep. Jeff Alexander (R-Provo) decided to retire. But he made the decision after the filing deadline so there was no other Republican to run for his seat. He left his name on the ballot and, since they haven’t figured out how to elect Democrats in Utah County yet, won. Then he promptly resigned.

When a seat is empty in the Utah legislature, the governor appoints a replacement. The parties and lawmakers have tied his hands to that he can only appoint the nominee of the party whose candidate won the most recent election. So it was to be the Republican party that chose a successor.

The delegates convened in January 2007 and voted for John Curtis by one vote over Chris Herrod. But there was a suspicious mix up in the bylaws of the already ethically dubious Utah County Republican Party. The rules had never been updated to reflect the governor’s limited discretion. So both names were submitted to the state party. Republican acting state chair Enid Greene, who previously resigned from Congress in disgrace after numerous election law violations, picked the candidate who won the smaller amount of votes, Herrod.

It is unknown what might have animated her decision. Curtis had shown an independent-minded streak once flirting with the idea of organizing an ultraconservative wing of the Democratic party just to offer some competition in Utah county. Did Herrod display some sort of blindly loyal herd behavior by contrast? Let’s take a look.

In 2005 and 2006 Rep. Jeff Alexander showed moderate independence by voting 21% and 25% Democratic in partisan votes. Rep. Herrod, representing the same district, scored only 2% and 5% in 2007 and 2008. Herrod earned the very lowest score in the entire Utah House in his first session.

Apparently Ms. Greene knows how to pick them.

(Yes, it is the Brian’s Utah Weblog policy to consider high Democratic ratings a sign of wisdom and independence while very low Democratic ratings are a sign of slavish obedience to pernicious authority. That would be inconsistent only if the Republicans were not so often wrong on the issues.)

The final installment of this series for now is the 2008 Senate partisan ratings. Background was explained in this post.

The legislators on the 50 partisan votes of 2008 Utah Senate,

The Deseret News runs famously flawed ratings of the legislature judging members on the number of sponsored bills passed. This year there was appropriate critical content and a nice survey of absences from committee votes.

Links:

• GOP had 9-1 edge in bills passed
• Some vote-skippers in the Legislature had excuses; others didn’t

Both of these are good stories and worth your time despite flaws.

It’s finally here. The 2008 Utah legislature partisan voting survey. Background information at this post. The last two weeks have seen data back to 2005 posted on Brian’s Utah Weblog.

Congratulations are due to Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck (D-SLC) for establishing the highest Democratic rating in her very first session as a representative.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my own Representative Jackie Biskupski (D-SLC) so far down one of these lists before.  Soon I’ll be posting on the votes that make up these ratings so we can drill a little deeper into what happened.

The legislators on the 60 partisan votes of 2008 Utah House,

Just like the House post, but for the 2007 Senate. Two thousand eight will be coming soon.

This is a tally of every Utah Senate roll call vote on a bill from the 2007 session where a majority of Democrats voted one way and a majority of Republicans voted the other. These usually include the closest and most controversial issues of the year so they give a better idea of a legislator’s performance than counting every single vote. About three out of every four votes in the Senate are unanimous and uncontroversial. One time this year the Senate even took a roll call vote over whether to adjourn for the day (it was unanimous).

Purely partisan procedural roll calls are very rare in both houses of the legislature and do not affect the results posted here.

D Votes are votes with the majority of Democrats. R Votes are with Republicans. Democratic Rating is the proportion of votes cast with Democrats with absences counted as one half vote for each partisan leaning.

The legislators on the 46 partisan votes of 2007 Utah Senate,

I’ve processed all the roll call votes from the 2008 Utah legislature’s General Session and there are some interesting results to report.

Let’s take a look at the question of who is the Scalia and Thomas of the legislature. Who is it that votes most like another legislator (not including missed votes)? The answer is that Senators Curt Bramble (R-Provo) and Dan Eastman (R-Bountiful) voted together 98.9% of the time. That’s an astounding 614 out of the 621 roll call votes both attended in 2008.

And they sit right next to each other.

Even when they aren’t copying each other’s work, they still give Utah’s teachers plenty of trouble. Bramble was Senate sponsor of the late unlamented voucher proposal and Eastman supported it.

The closest Democrats were Representatives Carol Spackman Moss (D-SLC) and Phil Riesen (D-SLC) with a 98.7% rate of agreement. And, yes, they sit together, too.

Note that 1008 of the 1437 roll calls on bills in 2008 have been unanimous and another 83 had a lone dissenter, so even the oddest of odd couples have been in agreement most of the time. The legislators like to pad their schedule with the chance to vote individually in favor of puppies and Christmas and the like.

The Democrat and Republican closest in their voting were Rep. Bud Bowman (R-Cedar City) and Rep. Karen Morgan (D-SLC) who agreed 95.82%. In the Senate the closest were Senator Mike Dmitrich (D-Price) and Senator Kevin Van Tassell (R-Vernal) who voted together 95.02% of the time.

The most likely to disagree were Rep. Mike Morley (R-Spanish Fork) and brand new Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck (D-SLC). They voted together only 77.09%. Since 69% of House votes were unanimous or had one lone dissenter, that’s not much agreement. The farthest apart Senators were Senator Margaret Dayton (R-Provo) and Senator Scott McCoy (D-SLC) who agreed 82.5% of the time. Astoundingly, 81.3% of Senate votes were unanimous or had but one dissenter.

The closest pairs:

1. Bramble and Eastman, 98.89%
2. Bramble and Sen. Carlene Walker (R-SLC), 98.81%
3. Walker and Sen. Wayne Niederhauser (R-Sandy), 98.71%
4. Moss and Riesen, 98.67%
5. Eastman and Walker, 98.65%

This is a continuation of the post on partisan House roll calls in 2005 (q.v.). More of these are coming, up through this year.

The legislators on the 76 partisan votes of 2007 Utah House,

This weekend we Salt Lake County Democrats got together at the library (Democrats like books) and elected our new legislative district chairs.  It was a nice chance to see people from your neighborhood and across the valley.  Each hour on the hour one set of districts’ leaders left and another arrived.  In the middle there were a few minutes to talk with people from other parts of the county.

In two weeks, it will be even better.  The Salt Lake County Democratic Convention will convene on Saturday, the 12th of April 2008 at Jordan High School (go Beetdiggers!) at 9880 S 98 E.  Jordan High is across Sego Lily Drive from the Sandy TRAX stop.

Everyone is welcome.  Yes, everyone.  Not just delegates.  Show up at 8:00 AM for issue caucuses and talk about issues and candidates with informed, active citizens all morning.  It’ll be great.

In national news, Texas they held their county conventions yesterday.  It’s a part of the Texas two-step, a multi-level process where party leadership and national delegates are selected according to multiple interlocking systems.  As the Texas process goes on, the state party apparently doesn’t even try to keep track of whom delegates are pledged to and no one knows exactly how the results came out.

Molly Ivins would have loved to be here to explain all this to us.

This is a continuation of the post on partisan House roll calls in 2005 (q.v.). More of these are coming, including the recent sessions.

I recall that Sen. Buttars was ill during this session.  His “slightly more moderate” rating reflects missed votes, not any sense of decency or compassion.

The legislators on the 51 partisan votes of 2006 Utah Senate,

Yes, it’s the best night to be a citizen in Utah. Get out to your neighborhood caucus meeting and meet your neighbors.

Democrats do it. Salt Lake County here.
Even Republicans do it.