caucus race · noun1
From caucus (“special party meeting for vote allocation”) + race (“contest between people”).
caucus race · noun2
From caucus (“regular party committee meeting of elected MPs”) + race (“contest between people”); a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter III "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale", being a nonsensical satire thereof: all participants have to run in circles until an arbitrary end is called and everyone is declared a winner; Alice has to give prizes to them all, and being declared a winner too, the Dodo solemnly takes her thimble and awards it back to her.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.