One of eight

We matter! They like us! We matter! They like us! With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all but deadlocked, Indiana isn't ignored this year. Obama hit Indianapolis, and Clinton is swinging through several Hoosier cities on Thursday. And Fort Wayne will be Blessed With Bill tonight at the Grand Wayne Center:

Morrone said there are no tickets for the event. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis for the “Solutions for America” rally.

If you're not actually going to the event, you might want to avoid downtown tonight. That's the downside of mattering -- all those news correspondents and TV crews might spend some money here, but they'll attract a big traffic mess.

We matter this year even more than most people probably think. Pennsylvania is another last-ditch state for Clinton, the way Texas and Ohio were, so everyone is concentrating on that. But Pennsylvania has only 158 delegates at stake April 22. The two states voting May 6 -- Indiana (72) and North Carolina (115) -- have more than that between them. If Clinton wins Pennsylvania by a comfortable margin, expect an intense two weeks here and nobody paying attention to the local races.

But we matter only because the race is so close that every single delegate counts. That doesn't happen very often, so do we really want to keep our primary so late that we're always one of only eight states left to go?