There has been an increasing about of back-and-forth about the meaning of victories in various primary and caucus states. Do blue states matter more than red states? Do a couple of big states matter more than a large number of little states?
These arguments, of course, are mostly just static to fill the nervous void until the next wave of primary results comes along. After all, the Democratic Party has come up with an ingenuous way to keep score: they are called delegates, and they are allocated in such a way that they will essentially reflect the relative share of the popular vote in all officially-sanctioned contests around the country.
However, there are other respects in which some states do potentially matter more than others. One is in the electoral math for the general election. If one candidate were performing systematically better in swing states than another, that might be an argument to nominate them. But both candidates have had their share of successes and failures in these contests -- Obama winning Missouri, Iowa and Colorado; Clinton winning Nevada and Florida -- so it is hard to make a case one way or another on these states.
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