The Note: Super Feeling:

Feb. 3, 2008 -- The tsunami has hereby been downgraded.

The wave of voting that will take place on Tuesday will be super, maybe even super-duper, and (if this primary season -- or this NFL postseason -- is any guide) it will crash through our assumptions and expectations.

But there's a flag on the play: Tuesday will not, in all likelihood, produce a Democratic nominee for president. (The Republicans are another story -- and it may not be a good story for former governor Mitt Romney; at least his heirs may feel differently, and he can fondly remember Maine.)

Those everybody-counts Democrats get exactly what they bargained for: Like a team that controls the ball but not the scoreboard, proportional delegate allocation means even a decisive win in overall voting (and in number of states won) doesn't guarantee any advantage at all in the delegate count.

Not that anyone looks like they're cruising toward anything (and keep that in mind, Patriots fans, as you settle into your easy chairs Sunday afternoon). That's just one of the reasons that Bobby Kennedy is getting more attention than the Lombardi Trophy, as the battle for California and for Latino voters begins to define the Democratic race.

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll has a virtual tie heading into the single biggest voting day of the primary season: It's Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton 47, Sen. Barack Obama 43, "with supporters of the now-withdrawn John Edwards seemingly dividing about evenly between them," ABC polling director Gary Langer writes.

As for the Republicans, Sen. John McCain "has vaulted to a 2-1 advantage in the Republican race in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, continuing a remarkable surge that began with his New Hampshire and South Carolina victories," Langer writes.

It's McCain 48, Romney 24, yet McCain's "support is comparatively soft, especially in some core GOP groups," per Langer's write-up.

"McCain's big lead in this new national poll matches a wave of increasing support seen in state polls, which, coupled with the GOP's winner-take-all rules, gives him the opportunity to effectively wrap up the nomination with a strong showing Tuesday," Dan Balz and Jon Cohen write in The Washington Post.

"The Democratic contest is likely to keep going. . . . Clinton's four-percentage-point edge in the survey is about the same as it was three weeks ago and does not constitute a significant lead, given the poll's margin of sampling error."

The candidates and their surrogates are out in force; Los Angeles alone on Sunday features events headlined by former President Bill Clinton (maybe apologizing, maybe not) and Obama backers Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy, while Chelsea Clinton and Sen. John Kerry held dueling events Saturday in the Bay Area.

And the former president has an intriguing Super Bowl date on Sunday with Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., the still-uncommitted former candidate whose support could provide a boost among Latinos.

The race is tighter than a Wes Welker timing pattern in the biggest state that votes on Tuesday: California. It's Clinton 36, Obama 34 in a new Field Poll.

"A startling surge of support for Barack Obama has catapulted the Illinois senator into a virtual tie with Hillary Rodham Clinton in California's Democratic presidential primary," John Wildermuth and Carla Marinucci write in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Clinton, a longtime California favorite, saw her once-commanding lead slip to two percentage points, 36 to 34 percent, in the new survey. That's down from the New York senator's 12 percentage point lead in mid-January and a 25 percentage point margin over Obama in October."

The advantage can be erased with a touchdown just about everywhere: McClatchy/Mason-Dixon polls in regional bellwethers have Clinton's lead at six points in Missouri, seven in New Jersey, two in Arizona, and nine in California, while Obama has a six-point edge in Georgia.

"That regional taste of the 22 Democratic contests on Tuesday suggests that the two will carve up the country, each emerging with a big bloc of delegates and the nomination far from clear. Second-place finishers win delegates in Democratic primaries," McClatchy's Stephen Thomma writes.

Obama, D-Ill., has a lopsided 55-24 advantage in his home state, per the Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll.

Back on the trail . . . everybody's trying to stir the sleeping giant: The battle over Latino voters is dominating the closing days of the race, in California and elsewhere. Obama is touting his support of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants -- a key point that won him La Opinion's endorsement.

On immigration, Obama tells ABC's David Muir: "My position has been very similar to John McCain's, who's may be the likely Republican nominee, and if he wants to try to parse out this one issue of driver's licenses, an issue of public safety, my response is that we have to solve the overall problem and this driver's license issue is a distraction."

Clinton, D-N.Y., is making a direct appeal to Latino voters as part of her closing argument, ABC's Kate Snow, Susan Kriskey, and Eloise Harper report. "I was so honored when Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Cesar Chavez's grandson decided to offer their support," Clinton said Saturday in Los Angeles.

"They wanted to speak out and make clear that what we need today is what Bobby's father and Cesar's grandfather knew had to be a part of policy and change. We need a doer. We need a fighter. We need a champion."

But will the real heir to the RFK legacy please stand up?

Clinton has an ad up featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cesar L. Chavez. "Today, Hillary Clinton is the champion of the voiceless in our society," Kennedy says.

But RFK's widow, Ethel Kennedy, came out for Obama on Saturday. "Barack is so like Bobby," she wrote in a statement released by the Obama campaign.

The advantage among Latinos still appears to rest with Clinton: "Latino voters are poised to play a pivotal role in Tuesday's Democratic primaries, giving a likely boost to Hillary Clinton and frustrating the momentum enjoyed in the past week by Barack Obama, who is struggling to make himself known among a voter group that has been overwhelmingly supportive of his New York rival," Susan Milligan writes in The Boston Globe.

Milligan continues: "Voters and political officials say that Obama's failure to connect effectively with Latinos is driven less by historical tensions between black and Latino communities than by the fact that Latinos know and like Clinton and have had little contact with the Illinois senator. Still, it could cost Obama critical delegates in states with significant Latino communities, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, New York, and New Jersey."