WASHINGTON-- --It's Chesapeake Tuesday. Or the Potomac primary.
By any name, tomorrow's election could be the most important presidential primary in decades for Maryland voters.
Over the weekend, the stakes were raised even higher, when Barack Obama rolled to landslide victories in Louisiana, Washington, Nebraska and the Virgin Islands.
An Obama sweep in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, which polls show is likely, could be one of the major turning points in the '08 campaign.
If he were to win by large enough margins, Obama could gain a lead over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race for the first time, according to the latest delegate tally.
Excitement on the Republican side may have dimmed somewhat, now that John McCain has been declared the presumptive Republican nominee.
But McCain was embarrassed by losses to Mike Huckabee on Saturday in Kansas and, especially, in the Louisiana primary, a result that Huckabee said surprised even him.
"I think we have a shot at Virginia. I think we have a shot at Maryland," Huckabee said on NBC, though polls show him trailing badly in both states. "I'm just one of those people who thinks we have a shot everywhere we go."
Winner-take-all victories for McCain tomorrow would help calm jittery Republican leaders. Many of them think that a weaker nominee is the last thing their party needs going into what is expected to be a tough November election. But the more effort McCain has to make to woo the most conservative members of his party, the harder it could be for him to attract centrist voters in the fall.
Clinton's strategists, meantime, readily concede that she is the underdog in Maryland and the other Feb. 12 primary contests. But how she loses is almost as important as winning, because of the way Democrats choose a nominee.
"Every vote counts," the lesson of the 2000 presidential election, is true again this year, with an added twist: Every delegate counts, too.
There is a growing possibility that the Clinton-Obama deadlock could last up to six more months, right up to the national convention in Denver, the week before Labor Day.
Over the past month, Obama has cut Clinton's delegate lead by two-thirds. She's now ahead by just 25 delegates, according to the latest Associated Press count.
If the Maryland vote is relatively close -- that is, if Obama fails to run up landslide margins statewide and in most key congressional districts -- he and Clinton will walk away with a near-even split of delegates, and Clinton will probably retain her national lead.
So what does the Maryland primary fight -- hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars, countless phone calls, mail pieces, volunteer hours and in-person visits by the candidates and their surrogates -- boil down to?
John T. Willis, a former Maryland secretary of state with deep experience in Democratic rulemaking, calculates that when all the votes are counted, the primary is probably a fight over no more than six delegates.
"Clinton would be pleased to hold Obama to between a four- and five-delegate advantage," he said, while Obama "is trying to get an eight-to-10-delegate advantage, out of the 70" that will be allocated by tomorrow's primary.
The competition is so tight, he explained, that "one of the reasons Bill Clinton is going into Battle Grove" -- the historically influencial Dundalk Democratic club where the former president campaigned yesterday -- was to try to hold Obama to a one-delegate net gain, rather than three, out of the 15 delegates that are allocated on the basis of the statewide vote.
With Clinton and Obama still almost 1,000 delegates away from the total needed to win the nomination -- and with only 1,783 left to be chosen, as of yesterday -- the nomination is likely to be decided by the superdelegates. They are the almost 800 elected officials and party activists from around the country who get to vote at the convention. Unlike delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses, who are pledged to support a specific candidate, superdelegates can support whomever they please.
A brokered convention "would not be good news," Democratic chairman Howard Dean said last week, though exactly how that will be avoided isn't clear.
One of the scenarios for Democrats: the candidate with more votes from superdelegates -- Clinton, at least for now -- wins the nomination over the candidate who won the most delegates in the primaries and caucuses -- at this point, that's Obama.
Obama has begun warning about just such a possibility. He said it is his "strong belief" that if he wins "the most states and the most pledged delegates from the most voters in the country," then it would be "problematic for the political insiders to overturn the judgment of the voters."
Clinton released a list yesterday of 10 Maryland superdelegate supporters, including Gov. Martin O'Malley, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski and Rep. C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, who could be in an uncomfortable spot if their constituents vote heavily for Obama and they back Clinton at a brokered convention.
O'Malley, appearing on ABC's This Week, denied that he was espousing a Clinton campaign position on the issue, which, as moderator George Stephanopoulos put it, was that "if superdelegates overturn the popular delegate vote, that's fine."
The governor ducked when he was asked if that was his view, but O'Malley did say: "I'm firmly committed to Sen. Hillary Clinton to be the next president of the United States, and I'm confident at the end of this process, she will prevail."
paul.west@baltsun.com