INDIANAPOLIS -- If this election were decided on the basis of which candidate generates the biggest sales of campaign merchandise -- t-shirts, baseball caps, badges, posters and keyrings -- there'd be little doubt about the result. "Obama outsells Hillary two-to-one. He's on fire," said a vendor named Maurice ("I'm not giving you my last name so you can put it in that newspaper of yours"), who was hawking his self-designed Obama t-shirts on a balmy evening here in the Indianan capital, as thousands of supporters waited in line to hear the candidate make his closing argument ahead of today's primary. A retired truck-driver based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Maurice had a stash of similar Hillary t-shirts in his car. "I'm a capitalist," he said. "I'll be voting for Obama, but my politics is: I want to make a couple bucks." If there's any sector of American society unequivocally happy about the neverending primary season, it's surely the motley band of unauthorised merchandise-sellers like Maurice, who sometimes travel many hundreds of miles in order to set up their pitches outside campaign events. Indiana hasn't been important in a Democratic nomination race since 1968. But now it is -- which means a whole new market of potential t-shirt purchasers.
It also means an extraordinary degree of attention is being showered on Indiana and North Carolina, where voters go to the polls today amid a strong sense that the race is tightening. I'll be blogging today from Indiana, and bringing you the results from both elections as they emerge tonight. Read on for a roundup of where things stand this morning in two states that could determine the Democratic nomination...
As Suzanne Goldenberg reported last night, polls yesterday gave Clinton a narrow lead in Indiana (49% to 43%) and Obama a narrow lead in North Carolina (48% to 45%). Each of those much-reduced gaps contain troubling possibilities for each candidate. Were Clinton to lose both states tonight, it's hard to see how her campaign could go on, and her aides haven't been pretending that it could. Were Obama to lose both, his campaign would be in serious trouble: he needs at the very least a clear win in North Carolina and not-too-drastic a loss in Indiana to demonstrate that he's weathered not only the ongoing Jeremiah Wright storm but also Clinton's much derided yet potentially effective backing for a suspension of the tax on gas, which has him rattled, judging by the amount of time he spent on it at last night's Indianapolis rally.
More delegates are in play today than in any of the other remaining primaries; today's New York Times has a good summary of the possible outcomes tonight and what they might mean. Then again, don't assume that even a terrible result would knock Clinton out: as Elizabeth Kolbert points out with concise brilliance in the New Yorker, the problem with building a campaign around the notion that you're the candidate people had written off is that such a campaign has no natural endpoint. If people write you off even more, that just reinforces your point.
