Members of the Town Committees from Kingston, Plymouth, Duxbury, Halifax and Middleborough will meet this evening and elect delegates to a caucus to select the nominee. (Plympton is also in the district, but as there is no Town Committee, they apparently will have no voice in the caucus.) Rules determine the number of delegates per town by votes for the party’s gubernatorial candidate in the previous election.
Throughout the last many weeks, we have been waiting for various interpretations from the Sec State’s office as to who may be a delegate, who may vote for a delegate, and how many delegates a town gets, all of which are not crystal clear as the House district is made up of portions of 4 of the 6 towns represented.
Tom Calter of Kingston, a member of the Silver Lake Regional School Committee and Chair of the Kingston DTC is the only publicly known candidate for the nomination.
To make matters more exciting, the Republican results are being contested in a recount later this week, as Olly DeMacedo launched a 12-day write-in campaign against Paul Curtis; Curtis won by 4 votes.
Beyond that, DeMacedo was on the ballot as a candidate for Plymouth County Commissioner, but he has declined that nomination in order to concentrate on the recount. At some point the RTCs of Plymouth county will caucus to select a nominee for that seat.
Ain’t politics fun!
The committee meetings and caucus were a tremendous time. First was introductions and rules. Tom O’Brien mentioned how rare it was to have this kind of process. As for the actual process, it turns out that all Democratic Town Committee members with voting privileges, no matter where they live in the town, may select delegates to the nomination caucus. Only registered Democrats who live in the district may be elected as delegates, even if they are not DTC voting members. Much discussion was held regarding the status of associate DTC members and emeritus DTC members.
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14 delegates were selected by the 5 town DTCs in separate committee meetings. The 14 then met as a caucus, led first by State Committee General Counsel and Rules Chair Bob LeClare and then by State Committee Chairman Phil Johnston. Susan Fenochietti Thomson, Executive Director of the State Party, was also there helping out.
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Tom Calter was unanimously nominated, and gave a quite passionate speech about the privilege of running and the dedication and diligence to his constituents with which he hopes to serve.
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Phil Johnston then graciously started the ball rolling further by writing out a $500 check to the Calter campaign.
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Johnston and Calter both praised Representative/Treasurer Tom O’Brien for his decade of service and high standard of service to the district, including never having missed one of over 3000 roll call votes in the House.
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The press was even there, local radio WATD and daily newspapers.
Deputy Legal Counsel Bob LeBlanc