Why the Democratic Race Could End in North Carolina

Still, Obama partisans and some unaffiliated Democrats, including Trippi, see North Carolina as Clinton's last chance to turn around her fading prospects — or face intense pressure from party leaders to suspend her campaign and avoid a summer of trench warfare that could hurt Democratic prospects in the general election this fall.

With Barack Obama headed to Hawaii for a week-long hiatus to cure the nation's "Obama fatigue," Hillary Clinton will steal the show Friday when her solo surrogate work on Obama's behalf begins in Nevada.

(ap/Reuters)

"She's running out of real estate," says Craig Schirmer, Obama's state director. "There are only so many contests left, only so many more delegates, only so many more votes to get."

An unexpected 'pivotal' role

The key audience for the North Carolina returns are the superdelegates crucial to boosting either rival's convention count to 2,024, the number needed for nomination.

"Hillary Clinton needs a win in North Carolina to be able to convince superdelegates to join her cause, and Barack Obama needs to win in North Carolina to put to rest any speculation that he could lose the nomination," says state party Chairman Jerry Meek, a Fayetteville lawyer neutral in the contest.

"So I think that we're going to play a pivotal role," he says.

That's as much a surprise to Meek as anyone else. Never before has North Carolina's primary been important in the Democratic nominating contest. It last played a notable role in the GOP contest more than three decades ago, in 1976, when challenger Ronald Reagan defeated President Gerald Ford.

Last year, a bill in the state Legislature to move up the primary in hopes of giving the state more clout failed. Neither Democratic campaign had opened an office or scheduled an appearance here until two weeks ago. Meek had been pleased mostly that the state had gotten two "bonus" superdelegates for resisting the temptation to hold an earlier contest.

Now North Carolina and the other states at the end of the Democratic primary calendar — Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota, plus Puerto Rico and Guam — are getting unusual attention.

In recent days, the Obama campaign opened 13 offices across North Carolina and sent in Schirmer, an architect of the senator's win in South Carolina and the campaign's state director in Wisconsin, which Obama carried. The Clinton camp dispatched Smith, who ran her winning campaigns in California and Texas.

Each is trying to set high expectations in a state where Obama has a 12 percentage-point lead, according to the four most recent state polls, averaged by RealClearPolitics.com. Schirmer calls the contest "very competitive" and "very, very close." Smith, on the other hand, says a win by Clinton "would be, like, one of the greatest upsets of the last quarter-century."

The Clinton campaign is pouring in resources, including separate visits during the past week by Hillary, Chelsea and Bill Clinton. On Friday, he stumped in seven cities, from Kannapolis to Gastonia. The former president acknowledges the stakes are high.

"This whole thing could come down to what you all decide to do in North Carolina," the former president told voters in Cary. "This is a state which is very much involved in all the promise and all the peril that's going on in the American economy."