My Experience at the Republican Convention '10

So I've spent the last couple of months helping Lee Perry run for the Utah House of Representatives. My experience in the Governor's Office has some mistakenly believing that I know something. Our opponent was a six-term incumbent with a long history in the county and family ties to the office.

We had to win 60% of the delegates to avoid a Primary. The incumbent had buckets of money in his war chest, and we were pretty sure that a primary election spelled certain defeat for us. We had to win with the delegates.

Our grass-roots image took a mighty hit when I asked Patti to design a campaign logo for us. It looked fantastic and very professional. The credit union folks had a handful of signs for us displayed in front of the meeting room.

The speeches were tense - I felt like Lee did the better job, but because it was so early in the morning it was hard to gauge the response of the delegates.

Lee had asked me to be his poll watcher. So after the ballots were cast, I followed the election judges down to ballot-count-central. I was feeling pretty good, and engaged the counters in some good-natured banter until the election judge prohibited me from talking to the counters. After that I engaged in clandestine banter.

There were 53 delegates who ended up coming. The number of eligible delegates was 57 so we knew that we needed 35 votes to get the 60%. I hadn't refigured what we needed for 53. They separated the ballots into piles of votes for each respective candidate. The pile that I watched being sorted had a bunch of votes for Lee's opponent. I had this sinking feeling in my stomach. I could tell we had more, but it seemed really really close.

They counted out stacks of ten and separated them. Lee had 3 stacks with some extras against 2 with an extra. I could feel myself getting dizzy as a tried to do math in my head. Math isn't a strong suit of mine anyway, and when you're having a hard time breathing because you're so nervous, it makes it much harder. 32 to 21 votes. Is that 60%? I'm not sure . . . .I pulled out the cell phone and moved it over to the calculator. I punched in the numbers and it came back . . . 60.38%!!!  We won by one vote. I had a really hard time believing it and kept questioning whether I had done the math correctly.

I guess when we walked back up into the room my face looked so disappointed that our campaign crew thought we had lost.

Here is the Lee Perry brain trust

and the winning candidates from Box Elder County

The best thing about winning right in convention early in the morning is that I got to enjoy the rest of the convention without worrying about working through a primary.

Thanks to Doug Beazer who shot the rest of these for me. Doug works for the local paper so he went and got press credentials and got to sit right up front next to a guy from CNN.

Other than Lee Perry winning, the best part of the day was getting to see a bunch of my friends from the Governor's Office. Apparently the office is in shambles without me (or at least they let me think that)