Yesterday, the Young Democrats National Convention selected its leadership team for the next two years, and the incumbent, Chris Gallaway, prevailed, along with his entire slate save for Secretary.
This was my first time ever attending a national meeting of the YDA, and it was probably among the most riveting floor votes in the organization's history. The contest for president was between Gallaway and the former president of the California Young Dems, a young Filipino from L.A. named Alex De Ocampo. At least at the top of their tickets, both sides seem to regard themselves as the champions of reform in the YDA, and to regard their respective opponents as the "business as usual" crowd. For those of us who believe that reform is critical at this particular historical moment - not just in the YDA but also in the Democratic Party at large - choosing between two factions competing over the reform message is a pretty healthy predicament. Now it's the burden of the victor to demonstrate that his message has real force of will behind it.
Though I don't doubt for a second that the incumbent's ticket is serious about leading the YDA in a new direction, the feeling of a real grassroots insurgency among the supporters of the Unity ticket was palpable at the convention. Whatever one might think of the leadership of the Unity faction, they've tapped into a real and visceral desire for change among the rank-and-file. A climactic expression of that sentiment came during the election of YDA Secretary, after Gallaway's ticket had swept every race that preceded it.
I'm still unclear about exactly what transpired during the vote count for Secretary, so if there are inaccuracies here and someone who was present is reading this, please correct me. What I gather happened was this:
In a lot of cases, delegation chairs were tallying up the votes of their delegates right there on the floor of the general session where the elections were taking place. After the delegate chair had an accurate count, he or she would wait until his or her state was called up to the front of the session and then would report the tally just taken. Often, this was happening simultaneously: as vote numbers were being reported officially at the front of the room, they were also being tallied up by state delegation chairs that hadn't yet been called to the microphone.
Convention rules state that the doors to the general session must be closed during vote counts, and opened back up in between. That means you can leave the floor during a vote count but you can't get back in. Thus, delegates who had left the floor to go to the bathroom or get a drink or make a phone call from the relative quiet of the lobby found themselves blocked from coming back inside while their states' votes were being tallied up, since this was being done at the same time as the official vote count. In effect, the rules were preventing them from voting.
Another thing that was happening was that delegates who were able to cast their votes in the tally but then had to leave to use the bathroom (I was among this crowd) had their votes counted and reported, but if their delegation were then challenged to produce a delegate for each vote that it claimed, which is any delegate's prerogative under Robert's Rules of Order, it would fall short because delegates who had voted but then left the room and been temporarily locked out obviously couldn't show themselves in front of the convention to prove that their votes were legitimate.
That's exactly what happened to the New York delegation during the election for Secretary. New York gave its votes to Rob Dolin from Seattle, the Unity candidate, and was then challenged by one of the states supporting the Gallaway ticket to prove the legitimacy of its vote tally by producing all of its delegates. As the challenger no doubt was aware, that was impossible because some of the New York delegates who had voted had since become locked out of the general session. But New York wasn't the only delegation in that predicament, and Unity supporters knew it. So fire was fought with fire, and Unity supporters started challenging delegations supporting the Gallaway ticket to produce all of their delegates, and pretty soon there was a massive battle on the floor, with entire delegations standing on their chairs chanting, "Count every vote!" at each other.
During this time I was locked out in the hallway with probably fifty other people and who knows how many others who were wandering around elsewhere on the premises. The locked-out delegates were crowding the doorway, which was open to let a draft into the general session (you could barely breathe in there with the doors closed) but with people blocking the entrance.
This was all conducted legitimately according to pre-arranged rules of the convention - I don't believe that there was any conspiracy behind it - but the spectacle of voting delegates being physically blockaded from entering the floor where votes were being cast was pretty disturbing, and I don't think that was lost on anybody present, including those who were holding the doors. An African-American woman, I believe from the New York delegation, wasn't mincing words about what was going on, which she likened to Republican voter suppression tactics in 2004. Others tended to agree, and as far as I could tell they belonged to both the Gallaway and the Unity side. The tumult on the outside was echoed and amplified on the inside, where the "Count every vote!" chants were being accompanied now by "Let the delegates in!" and "Open the doors!" But rules are rules.
With the vote counts all reported and adjusted to account for successful challenges, Dolin had won the majority of the votes that were cast, but not the majority of total votes in the convention. The difference between the two numbers, of course, was the group of delegates locked out of the session and whose delegations' counts had been challenged. The rules prevented Dolin from taking his seat as Secretary without the majority he needed. With all the acrimony that had been built up in the room over the challenges, the pot was ready to boil over.
A motion was then made to declare Dolin the winner by acclamation, which may have opened up a whole new brawl if not for the fact that Dolin's opponent for the position, Flora Brooke Hesse from Georgia, made the most (perhaps the only) dignified political move of anybody that day, and seconded the motion, in effect conceding the race. Dolin was the only candidate on the Unity ticket to prevail.
Whether that means that Dolin, the only officer on the new team from the opposition slate, is in an unenviable position or not depends upon how committed the Gallaway team is to embracing and championing the same message that Unity purported to stand for: reform. I'm quite new to the YDA, so I'm not in a position to evaluate the politics of the organization over the President's first term, but to date I don't have any reason to believe that the Gallaway team is anything less than a hundred percent devoted to the mission of making the YDA a more relevant force in progressive politics and a stronger advocate for the interests and concerns of young people. Support for the Unity ticket came from an appetite for the same objectives. Tensions borne from competing approaches to a similar vision can either bolster solidarity or rupture it, and the difference is the measure of leadership. This is the task at hand for the new team formed in San Francisco this weekend.
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