It’s caucus day in Wyoming, which is one of the boxy Rocky Mountain states without a well-known film festival to bring in celebrities and news cameras. If you’ve never heard of it, Wyoming is the real purrty place that lives right below Montana. If you’ve never heard of Montana, it’s the real purrty place that lives right under Canada. If you’ve never heard of Canada, it’s the real purrty suburb to the world! Anyway, Democrats are swarming the polls in Wyoming today. According to Yahoo news: “In 2004, 675 people statewide took part in the Wyoming caucuses. In Sweetwater County today, more than 500 people crowded into a high school auditorium and another 500 were lined up to get inside. ‘I’m worried about where we’re going to put them all. But I guess everybody’s got the same problem,’ said Joyce Corcoran, a local party official. ‘So far we’re OK. But, man, they keep coming.’”

This historic swarming of people to the polls is the problem the Democratic party will face when it comes time to take official tally of the superdelegate vote. We commoner voters are invested in this primary in a way Democratic primary voters have never been invested before and in a way the machinery of the Democratic Party surely did not take into account as it developed the superdelegate system back in the 1980s. The result seems to be that if the party fails to be seen as embracing the “will of the people” in choosing its presidential nominee, it risks turning off completely all of the first-time voters who have thronged to the polls this year— the famously formerly “apathetic” young voters and minority voters who together will go a long way to putting a Democrat in the White House in the fall. We all have faith in the process on some level now. The risk of dashing that new-found hard-won faith on the rocks of party machinery could be catastrophic. Yes, by that we mean a de facto extension of the Bush years, which has become the very definition of catastrophe! Democratic Party Chairmen Howard Dean, whaddya gonna do?

Flickr of Laramie, Wyoming: Kdriese