GOP presidential caucus met in La Conner

Politics can get quite heated in this day and age. But on Saturday Mother Nature cooled more than campaign rhetoric.

Extreme cold weather, with temperatures plunging into the low teens and below throughout greater La Conner, greatly reduced turnout at a Skagit County Republican Party caucus at the Civic Garden Club Building that morning.

A couple dozen GOP and independent voters arrived the first hour of the caucus, which ran from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., and chose delegates to the county and state Republican Party conventions.

A straw vote of GOP presidential candidates was taken.

Several expressed support for former South Carolina governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a center-right alternative to former President Trump and other more conservative presidential hopefuls.

“The turnout today was expected to be low because of the weather,” said an event volunteer, who staffed the registration table and noted that the water pipes at her home had frozen overnight.

Meanwhile, outside the Garden Club, Evie and Marilyn Johnson braved the frigid conditions to display anti-Trump signs to Second Street traffic.

Marilyn Johnson noted that her family’s lineage includes the famed American explorer William Clark, who with Meriweather Lewis led the expedition of 1804-06 across the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Ocean.

Clark did much of the mapping for the expedition, which spent a miserable winter at Fort Clatsop, near modern-day Astoria, Oregon.

“The way I look at it,” said Marilyn Johnson, who was bundled for the weather, “if William Clark could spend three months out in the cold at Fort Clatsop, we can manage three hours out here with our signs.”

Washington is a presidential primary election state. Registered voters will receive a ballot in the mail after Feb. 23. Republican and Democratic Party candidates are on a single consolidated ballot. Voters may vote for only one candidate.

Since residents do not declare a party when registering to vote, primary voters will choose and mark a party box and sign declarations on the return envelope as part of Washington’s presidential nominee process.