Last week, there was a bit of buzz online about the process in Connecticut that Democrats use to select delegates to the National Convention in Denver. This morning, I received an email about Massachusetts’ process for selecting delegates to the national convention. Their caucuses will be April 5th and sound pretty similar to what happens in Connecticut.

However, there are other conventions besides the National Convention. In Connecticut, there are nearly two hundred other conventions. There is a convention for each State Representative seat, each State Senate seat, each Congressional District, and the State Convention. Typically, these conventions don’t get as much attention as the National Convention, which is too bad, because they can be great fun and important events.

This year they may be even more interesting and exciting, due to the new campaign finance laws. The goal of these new laws is to make it easier for people to run, so hopefully there will be more candidates showing up at the conventions.

The State Legislative conventions work differently from the National Convention. For the National Convention, the primary determines how many delegates each candidate gets going into the National Convention. With the State Legislative conventions, the delegates get selected at special caucuses or meetings of Democratic Town Committees. The candidate that gets the most delegates at the convention becomes the nominee, but can be challenged in a primary afterwards.

The rules for the Connecticut Democratic Party, as I understand them, is that delegates to these other conventions need to be selected this week. I’ve been trying to find out when these delegate selection meetings will take place and what rules will be in effect. In Woodbridge, we will be having our meeting Thursday at 8 PM ‘at the center rm 16’. I am new to Woodbridge, but sent a message to the DTC Chair in town and he promptly got back to me with details.

Sophia on MyLeftNutmeg posted information about the Glastonbury Democratic Caucus, which will also take place on Thursday at Democratic Headquarters, 2341 Main Street, Glastonbury, CT.

I sent an email to as many members of State Central as I could find email addresses for, which was at least half of State Central. Brian Anderson forwarded my message on to Chris Pitts on the communications committee of the Canterbury DTC. Chris sent me details about their delegate selection process. They will be meeting 7pm on April 1st at the Canterbury Town Hall. Besides Brian, and my DTC chair, who is also on State Central, only one other member of State Central responded. She noted that their delegate selection would take place during their regularly scheduled DTC meeting, but she forgot to tell me when and where that meeting will be.

So, the amount of information available online about how to get involved in Democratic politics in Connecticut is slowly improving, but it is still significantly lacking. If you know of other delegate selection meetings, please leave a comment here or drop me a note at aldon dot hynes at orient dash lodge dot com. Let’s get people more involved.