I just watched Larry King where Carville is spewing this BS about "Indiana is the tiebreaker" without much of a complaint from any of the Obama supporters. I know Obama said this at one point, but he, and his surrogates, need to back off this ridiculously stupid consent. Just because a state looks like it could be close does NOT mean that its significance is somehow elevated as far as the primary race goes. If the IN primary had occurred sometime in February, it's likely no one would be giving 2 shits about the way IN voted.
Quite simply stated, IN is not a tiebreaker because there is no tie. Obama is leading by an insurmountable amount (unless Super Delegates decide to throw the general election by overriding the voters), and therefore there ARE no tiebreakers.
But if we do, for some reason, want to buy into the hype that some upcoming state has IMMENSE importance as far as the race goes, then there is absolutely NO reason why that state should be Indiana. Instead, it should be North Carolina. Just because it looks like it will be an Obama blowout does NOT mean that it is somehow less important than IN. In fact, it's much easier to argue that it's more important, even using Clinton's favorite themes:
- "Big States": North Carolina is the 10 most populous state in the United States. According to Wikipedia, NC has 9,061,032 people, a full 2,715,743 more people than IN. It also carries 4 more electoral votes than IN.
- Swing State: Rasmussen puts McCain and Obama even in its last poll of NC. It's a state that the Democrats can definitely carry this year, and if we're actually somehow (stupidly) equating primary performance with General Election performance, Clinton had better be able to show she can beat Obama here... particularly when she's showing weakness in several "Kerry" states like WI, MN, WA, OR, and, Clinton's new favorite state MI in polls, not to mention other important winnable states like IA and CO. At the same time, IN is unlikely to be a swing state in this election. (To the extent that it could be, Obama actually runs slightly better there than Clinton in the only poll out so far, but it still looks bad for both of them and there's little to no chance that it'd swing for Clinton).
- Close Race: This one's more for the media, but if we want to look at a close race, recent polling shows that this is just as close, if not closer, than even PA started out as. SurveyUSA's last poll puts Obama's lead at just 9%, while their first poll of PA put Clinton's lead at a blowout level 19%. Obama was able to improve his standing in a tailor-made Clinton state by 10%, what will it say about Clinton if she's not able to improve at least as much in NC?
Honestly, I think this is all so stupid... the "decisive" victory is the victory to be had by winning THE WHOLE PRIMARY, not arbitrary states chosen by Clinton. But to the extent that we are simply incapable of recognizing that, and absolutely have to have "the next big state" to focus on, NC is a far better state to look at.