Why not vote for Sanders? That could work as a protest vote against Clinton. Though you'd have to see where they are by the time voting rolls around to your state.
Meanwhile, California, which has a huge chunk of delegates for the democrats (and a sizeable chunk for republicans), is dead last in June. With such a huge chunk of delegates, it would be nice to have it be earlier, but I guess due to our huge chunk of delegates, it makes some sense to have it late to act as a bit of a tiebreaker. However, the thing is that it's so late, the nomination is usually decided by that point, so, it ends up being moot.
BTW, I voted for Obama back in 2008, and I vote as independent.
Seriously, California has 546 democrat delegates, that's several states combined! edit: Wait, how many of those are superdelegates?....
That's why I said "if the Clinton juggernaut has already crushed my hopes". We don't vote till early March (which is still way better than it used to be -- we were nearly the last state in most preceding elections). If Sanders still has any kind of reasonable chance, I'll be voting (and probably volunteering) for him. But if Clinton already has it sewn up, then I'm not sure it's worth it to cast a meaningless protest vote (and I think it would be very meaningless -- Clinton and the DNC aren't going to shift their positions in any meaningful way just because a minority disagree with them).
That's kinda nuts about California. It used to be part of Super Tuesday, in early February. This cycle's Super Tuesday is Mar 1. NC goes two weeks after that, so it could be more or less over by then, although there will still be a number of large states up for grabs -- Illinois, Floria, Pennsylvania, and fuckhueg California. So as long as Clinton doesn't dominate every race after NH, it still might be an open game at that point.
Independents in Kentucky can't vote in primaries, so nobody registers independent. And nobody here views it as declaring an allegiance, it's just a bureaucratic hoop you have to jump through. And if you're a Bernie-type independent or a Rand-type independent you're only going to be looking at one of the primaries anyway. Honestly it's pretty overtly shitty but it inconveniences most people little enough that there isn't any push to change it.
Yeah, that's how it used to be here. Since they opened the primaries up to independents/"Unaffiliated", "Unaffiliated" has ballooned from 17.9% in 2004 to just above 28% of the electorate as of the beginning of this year. At the current rate of growth, Unaffiliated will overtake Republicans as the 2nd largest registration bloc in NC within a year or two.**
**Don't ask me how NC can be 40% Democrat vs. 30% Republican and still wind up with an R governor, two R Senators, and an R-dominated legislature. There's a lot of factors at play, including gerrymandering, an ineffectual NC Dem organization, weak turnout, and conservative rural white Dems who never got the memo about the party realignment of the '64/'68 elections.
EDIT: Heh...looking at my voter history, I forgot I voted in the GOP primary in 2012. Think I voted Santorum for maximum lulz.