Feb 10, 2008 3 min read

It turns out the Pennsylvania primary election on April 22 may have an impact after all, at least on the Democratic presidential nominating process. While defections in the Republican field have practically anointed Sen. John McCain as the Republican nominee, a closer-than-expected race between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has turned the Democratic nomination into a real tug-of-war. Clinton and Obama were running neck-and-neck after the Super Tuesday primaries. Clinton had 1,045 delegates and Obama had 960 delegates; 2,025 are needed to capture the party’s nomination. If that trend keeps up, particularly after primaries in Texas and Ohio on March 4, some are saying Pennsylvania will become a key player in deciding the nomination.

Perhaps the key player.

“We could be a decider; maybe the decider,” says Terry Madonna, a professor and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster. That’s because Pennsylvania has 158 Democratic delegates at stake when voters head to the polls.

Remember not too long ago when other states, envious of the clout held by New Hampshire and Iowa in the nominating process, started moving up their primaries in order to supposedly have more of a say? That idea was batted around in Pennsylvania, too, with advocates of the move saying that by April 22 everything is long decided.

Traditionally, that may be the case. But the tightness of this year’s contest on the Democratic side proves that the nation’s sixth most populous state may not have to follow the pack in moving up its primary in order to play a role in the presidential nominating process.

According to the Associated Press, Clinton and Obama are just starting to organize their Pennsylvania campaigns. In other years that may have been a mere formality for a candidate deemed the acknowledged frontrunner, such as McCain on the GOP side.

But this time around, it doesn’t appear that neither Democrat can afford to take the Keystone State for granted. That’s a good thing. Maybe we’ll even get a presidential candidate visit or two in our neck of the woods.

Here’s hoping that Clinton and Obama keep up their spirited race, and that neither candidate pulls ahead by a significant margin. That way, Pennsylvania will be an important cog in the process, befitting its status as one of the nation’s most populated states.

And we won’t even have to move our primary election up to January or February to be a factor, like some other states felt compelled to do.