I hope hillary fights this all the way to the convention floor...

...honestly I do see the value of caucuses.  I think that activist support is an important value in a candidate, and caucuses really show off a candidate's ground game.  They prevent a legacy candidate from winning solely on name recognition, which is valuable to me (though there were no caucuses involved, I had the pleasure of voting against Hubert H. Humphrey the Third for governor of my state, and I didn't even have to vote Republican to do it!).

Remember, in a perfect world these primaries and caucuses should be gatherings among friends; we're all Democrats.  We all want the same thing: victory in November.  What's wrong with stating our case in an official setting?  Also, it's very difficult for movements like Operation Chaos to interfere with caucuses, because generally the perpetrators don't know enough about their fake candidate to be convincing.

Like I said, I personally would rather have pure primaries, but there is value in these caucuses, or we wouldn't have a long tradition of using them.

I'm really doubtful you can make an assertion that these results have any contact to the primary results.

There is actually little evidence that Caucus elections disadvantage one group over another.  Though their turnout is quite a bit lower... they are not lower amongst any specific group.  I just got from a conference on Elections and Voting Behavior and a paper was presented on this topic. Chris Achen from Princeton was the presenter.  I heard Tom Mann and Martin Gilens reply...and then had to step out for the afternoon.  However, it was well done... I noticed a few flaws, but the thesis still held.

the elections for 4 Pcts. All my GooPer 'friends' voted for Hillary. That was only 4 days after Rush called for them to do it. It's that simple.

The thing is, the primaries and the caucuses are not elections, they are delegate selection processes.  The purpose is for the state party to decide how to apportion its delegates to the national convention.  That's all; and that's a far different animal than directly selecting the nominee.

If, as you say, the caucus results are skewed toward the campaign with the best organization and the most money; I'd say that as a measure of who is the strongest candidate, those are reasonable metrics.  Good men and women who would be great presidents never get to the primaries for lack of those two things.  

Organization and money are the lifeblood of a good campaign, and if a state party wants to weed out the also-rans for lack of those two necessities, I'd say they're well within sensible criteria to do so.

Again, it's not a beauty contest, it's a means of selecting the best candidate and best campaign organization.  You or I may not like the process or the results, and it may seem undemocratic; but it's actually a very practical way to do it IMO.

Some caucuses use the secret ballot (like in MN).

I like my Minnesota caucus it was a chance to get to meet a lot of new people and organize to win in November, the local party is much strogner (not that they really needed it here in Dinkytown/Stadium Village/Prospect Park neighborhoods on the U but a republican won't break over 20% in this small area due to how well organized we are.

Umm- Will be glad to welcome Sen Clinton to the electoral reform cause, but this is their system. And Terry and Harold all signed off on the current rules for the Clintons.. Caucuses favor insiders,normally. It's a system built for party regulars. 40 years ago, we picked the nominee without any input from rank and file dems- many states had "unit rule" at the convention which meant that all the state's votes were cast for whoever had the majority. Only 2 or 3 states had any primaries for delegates, usually beauty contests.

Actually, Texas is different from Washington State and Nebraska in that Texas had the caucus and the primary on the same day. This makes a big difference, because once someone votes in a same day primary, he or she is more likely to stay or comeback for the caucus because the same day primary reduces the marginal cost of attending the same day caucus. Because Clinton supporters are less likely to attend a caucus, Clinton got more votes in the Texas Caucus than had the caucus been held on a different day.

Thus, Texas is not a good indicator of what would happen if all states went to a primary. If all states went to a primary, Clinton would have done much better than what Texas would have predicted.

In fact a statistical study published by an Obama supporter at the DailyKos showed that (all else equal) Clinton does 12.5 percent better in primary states than in caucus states. Thus, if Clinton lost a caucus state to Obama by a 62.5-37.5 percent margin, then the state most likely would have been a 50-50 toss up in a primary.

You also have to be careful when analyzing states such as Nevada, New Mexico and Guam. Although these contests were denoted as caucuses, these caucuses functioned more like primaries so Clinton was competitive in those states.