In nonpresidential election years, caucuses of the Hawai'i Democratic Party are affairs for the truly committed and easily entertained.

But in presidential years, interest soars dramatically. That's certainly the case this time around. Democrats meet Feb. 19 to begin their delegate selection process, and the party reports a surge of new interest in attending the caucuses.

There is less activity on the Republican side, largely because the GOP handles most of the delegate selection process within the state convention itself. But for the Democrats, the candidate preference of the bulk of Hawai'i's 29 delegates to the national convention will be decided by those Feb. 19 caucuses.

And with the seesaw now under way between U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, there is a growing chance that those meetings might even mean something in the larger presidential caucus. Nationally, there is talk now of the campaigns shifting their emphasis from a state-to-state process to a delegate-by-delegate fight where every warm body matters.

Congressman Neil Abercrombie, an automatic delegate and Obama backer, certainly thinks this way. He has been predicting Hawai'i's caucuses will be an important cog in the nominating process since no candidate has the deal sewed up. That may be so today, but don't forget that the massive super primary on Tuesday will settle a lot of the delegate count. That's true even though many of those Tuesday states allocate delegates according to the percentage of popular vote a candidate gets rather than, like Florida, awarding on a winner-take-all basis.

The campaigns themselves certainly aren't writing anything off, including tiny Hawai'i. Our "superdelegates," nominally noncommitted party leaders and members of Congress, report being deluged with phone calls and contacts from the major campaigns.

But even if the national scene is clear by caucus time, the meetings could have a major impact on local party politics. That happened in a big way in the 1988 presidential year, when evangelical Christians inspired by televangelist Pat Robertson quietly signed up for Republican caucuses in droves and shifted the Hawai'i delegation and the state party itself in a decidedly conservative direction. The changes even led to the defection of several moderate Republicans to the Democratic Party.

So don't say these meetings don't count for something, no matter what has happened on the national scene.

This year the Democrats will follow a convoluted process that would challenge the skills of a Talmudic scholar. But the bottom line is straightforward:

Thirteen delegate slots will be allocated directly based on the caucus results. Other slots, such as at-large and unfledged party leaders, will be allocated according to the preferences of those elected at the caucuses.

The eight top party leaders (superdelegates) go to the convention and vote any way they wish. But some already have lined behind particular candidates. Abercrombie is with Obama and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye is with Hillary Clinton, for instance.

So whether Hawai'i-born Obama triumphs or Clinton re-establishes her juggernaut, or something totally unexpected happens, the caucuses and their impact on the local party will matter. They might even matter in serious and perhaps unexpected ways.

Jerry Burris' column appears Wednesdays in this space. See his blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com/akamaipolitics. Reach him at jrryburris@yahoo.com.