Who knew this democracy thing would be such a popular idea?
As it turns out, back in the 2009, after watching the Obama-Clinton election battle drive 37,000 Hawaii Democrats to the special presidential primary in Hawaii, the Hawaii Republican Party voted to start holding its own presidential primaries.
The first one was in 2012, luring 10,228 Republicans to polls across the state.
“I can’t see many negatives and there are a lot of positives — we are definitely keeping it and will work to make the caucus even better,” said Fritz Rohlfing, the state GOP chairman.
Nathan Paikai, the leader of the Hawaii for Trump campaign, said he was one of the GOP members who helped push the state convention to approve the caucus plan.
Now he and other Trump supporters are saying that the additional GOP voters are directly the result of their candidate’s campaign.
The first tally of Tuesday’s GOP caucus votes showed 13,377 votes cast, but there were still 2,043 provisional ballots to be counted, pushing the entire turnout to more than 15,000.
Some observers are estimating that many of the 5,000 GOP additional voters are both newly joined Republicans and Trump supporters.
One of them is an overjoyed Paikai, who is happy to be adding to the GOP fold.
“It was out of this world. Hopefully it is because we as a party, we created this caucus,” Paikai said.
Rohlfing is not sure all the extra votes can be attributed to Trump.
“I think they are spread out through all the candidates, although probably there are more Trump and (Sen. Ted) Cruz, but every candidate drew more Republican voters,” Rohlfing said.
Hawaii’s lone GOP state senator, Sam Slom, was not sold on the idea of the caucus election when first announced, because he feared that if only a handful of voters bothered to show up, it would weaken the entire GOP presidential field.
But the 15,000 voters, Slom said, show “just how determined people were to express their opinion.”
The question now is whether the GOP can both use and hold on to the new voters.
Rohlfing said he could see support for candidates in the 2012 and 2014 state House elections because of new voters in areas that had not supported Republicans in the past, including Mililani and the North Shore.
Paikai took an even more optimistic tone, saying, “They are interested; they are going to stay. I am going to ask them to stay, because we are making solutions, not disillusions.”
Slom is more cautious. While he sees “a new paradigm that means there is a possibility for more elected Republicans,” it will come down to the GOP finding and supporting good candidates in the fall elections.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
