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...