With Hoosiers and Tarheels going to the polls already, it’s time for another set of predictions.
Indiana
To tell the truth, Barack Obama never really became competitive here. Indiana was Clinton country from the beginning and, with the exception of one outlier poll from Zogby, Hillary Clinton remains in the lead with an average spread in her favor of 5 percentage points.
Therefore, I think we’ll see Clinton win handily here today, perhaps coming close to her near 10% margin in Pennsylvania’s primary.
North Carolina
There was a time when North Carolina looked like it wasn’t going to be a contest at all. Barack Obama was ahead by 15 or more points even after round one of the Jeremiah Wright story broke. And, it seemed like any battle on May 6th would be a short one indeed.
Not anymore.
Hillary has consistently closed in the polls over the past two weeks, and she has cut Obama’s lead in half. The final Insider Advantage poll, for example, showed Hillary only four percentage points behind Obama and has this interesting insight:
InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery: “This race is going to be closer than most experts expected. If the African-American vote is 35% or higher, then I expect Sen. Obama to win, most likely by a 52%-to-48% margin. If white voters have turned out at a higher than expected level, thus driving the black percentage overall closer to the 31-32% level, then the race could be up for grabs. White voters in the poll crossed the margin number for Clinton of 60%-plus for the first time. But the ‘Unaffiliated Voters’ and voters in the age group of 45-to-64 (who previously leaned Clinton) are the two demographic groups keeping Obama ahead of the game. This race really is about turnout and the higher it is, the more likely we will see a closer than expected finish.”
D.J. McGuire predicts a surprise Clinton victory in the Tarheel State and, while I’m not willing to go that far out on the limb, I do think we’ll see an Obama victory that is so narrow that the Clinton folks will be able to spin it into a victory.
I’ll take a look at the delegate math after we have the results tomorrow but, until then, consider this — after tomorrow there will be more undecided superdelegates than unallocated pledged delegates remaining.
Which leads to the final prediction — forget the fact that the last primary is June 3rd, forget Howard Dean’s unenforceable deadline, this race is going all the way to the convention.
