What do we do about the Washington primary?

Believe it or not, there is a primary in Washington state on Tuesday. Ten days after the caucuses that overwhelmingly awarded their delegates to Obama and that McCain very narrowly prevailed in (after a quite chaotic count), the state voters are once again called to the polls to determine two new winners.

There will be delegates awarded in the GOP contest (19 of them, mostly on a proportional basis), but none in the Democratic one, making Tuesday's primary between Obama and Clinton yet another beauty contest. But that does not mean there will not be voters. 250,000 participated in the caucuses on the 8th, much more are expected to participate in the primary. The New York Times reports that turnout of about half the state's voters -- 1,5 million in both parties -- is expected on Tuesday.

So it is obvious that the results will look rather different than the caucus ones did -- and I'm not even talking about complicating factor like whether those who went to caucus will think of the fact that they should vote again in the primary if they want their vote to be counted in that election too. But since there are no delegates in play at all for Democrats -- and we know how this is now all down to delegates -- does it matter at all?

In fact, the Washington primary could end up being an important part of the spin war because it will provide one empirical answer to "the caucus question:" Do caucuses really benefit Obama, perhaps even in a way that is unfair? That is the argument of the Clinton camp, and since they are trailing widely in the delegate count of states like CO, MN, ID that hold caucuses, it is in their interest to imply that the result -- and thus the delegate count -- would have been much closer had the states held primary. This argument is of course designed to provide superdelegates the cover to vote against Obama if he leads among pledged delegates at the end of the day.

So we will have to compare Tuesday's results with those of the caucus, which Obama won 68% to 31%. It looks very improbable that the same kind of margin can be sustained in a primary, so Obama certainly does not have to win with this big a margin. But it is also clear that the closer Hillary gets, the better positioned she will be to argue that caucuses are undemocratic and that their results should be taken with care. And inversely, the less Obama gives ground the stronger his rebuttal to Clinton.

Where do we draw the line? How close does it have to get for Clinton to have a point? That's entirely due to the spin war and to the perception out of Tuesday.