The conservative pro-corporate slate won nearly all of the seats in the election for delegates to the state Democratic Party, results released tonight show.
A slate backed by progressive groups won only two of the 14 seats in Assembly District 17, on the east side of town, and none in District 19, on the west side.
You can see the results here. Nick Ferris and Virginia Cheung were the only candidates endorsed by progressives who made the cut.
The remarkable fact: Only 1,159 people cast ballots in AD 17, and only 753 in AD 19. A swing of just 50 votes in AD 17 would have given the progressives a majority.
There are 191,000 registered Democrats in that district who were eligible to vote.
Not a lot of people pay attention to these races, although they help determine the direction of the state party—and also play a key role in party endorsements.
The voting process has always been a bit messy. But when people lined up at a labor hall to vote in person, even in the rain, the vote totals were higher than this time around, when most of the voting was online.
Voting online wasn’t easy: You had to register, give your date of birth and address to check that you are a registered Democrat—and then you got a message with a code. If you lost or didn’t get the code, it was almost impossible to renew.
Some in-person voting was still available, and by all accounts, the conservative slate bused in voters to cast ballots.
Still: Less than one percent of the eligible voters made it through the process.
“We could have won this,” Peter Stevens, who helped organize the progressive slate, told me. “We are already talking about the next time.
