The people that showed up to support their candidates on Mercer Island were ready to discuss and debate.

Discussions on topics ranged from abortion to healthcare to the environment.

In precinct groups John McCain and Mike Huckabee were represented, in a few Ron Paul and Mitt Romney had supporters.

One group debated about whether McCain or Huckabee should receive their delegates.

“McCain is going to be our nominee and I’ll support him when the time comes, but right now I think he needs to reach out more to the right side,” an older caucus go-er said. He later stated that we just needed to show McCain that he should exercise a more right wing approach.

“I think if we push our candidate back to the right we’re cutting off his hope to reach the center,” another group member countered. “We need to elect somebody that’s going to push the candidates where the party can’t or won’t be able to reach come election time.”

After talking about where they and their candidates stood on environmental issues and the idea of how to think about electing a candidate in regards to the state platform they wrapped up the meeting and decided on delegates.

“We ended up deciding the delegates mainly by the people who were interested in attending. That happened to be one who supported McCain, one who supported Huckabee and one who supported Romney. So we got a diversity of opinions in our group even though we could decide in a consensus that we were going to support McCain,” the precinct captain said.