It’s almost time for the people of Pennsylvania to deliver a dramatic…whimper. The process has probably been very exciting for the voters and local activists in that state. As a Texan, I loved our moment in the presidential sun. And I think that the tightness of our primary popular vote and delegate win for Obama did give the junior Senator from Illinois some superdelegate momentum . But it seems that the long interval before Pennsylvania’s election and the lack of novelty to Obama’s consistent gap-closing seem to have rendered the primary a bit less dramatic and not as informative about substance.

Statewide tracking polls keep getting mentioned. New data is always treated as news, but really, is there any news there? At this point the new polls only matter if the Clinton leads are humungous enough to impact Obama’s popular vote lead. They are not. Everybody that’s paying attention knows it’s about the delegates. And as this CQ analysis points out, it presently looks like Sen. Clinton will net three more delegates.

So let’s get ready for another round of Wolfson saying that Pennsylvania really, really counts. The Obama people will point to the national scoreboard (again.) Everyone will talk about the low mathematical probability of Clinton winning but why it makes sense for her to stay.

But I am starting to think that Democratic voters themselves want to get to the main event. This PPP analysis highlights the significant number of North Carolina voters that might be looking to provide a decisive victory in order to end the primary. We might start seeing Obama surrogates start to more aggressively use this argument, especially if there is a strong North Carolina Obama win where this theme emanates from the voters themselves.