Maryland officials took a political gamble when they decided to align with Virginia and the District of Columbia in scheduling the Feb. 12 event alternatively known as the "Chesapeake Primary" or the "Potomac Primary." That placed the Maryland primary on the far side of the massive 24-state voting event on Feb. 5 - the "Super Tuesday" for the 2008 presidential nominating campaign.

Yet that gamble has paid off with a week's worth of intense candidate and media attention for Maryland and its Chesapeake Primary cohorts, as voters in those locales prepare to vote on Tuesday. For the first since 1984, Super Tuesday did not definitively establish the clear front-runners in both parties - giving Maryland at least a brief moment at center stage in the presidential campaign.

The remaining top-tier contenders - Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for the Democrats and Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for the Republicans - have been actively seeking votes in Maryland over the past week.

In fact, Maryland did better for itself by waiting a bit than it did in past elections when the state held its primary on Super Tuesday or even before. While its voters in those years got to participate in the quasi-national primaries that set the tone for the remainders of those campaigns, Maryland was consistently overshadowed by much larger states voting on that day - and, as a result, received little personal attention from the candidates and the media.

In most presidential primaries since 1988 - the year Maryland first abandoned its traditional May primary date - the state's voters have joined most other states in favoring (or establishing) the parties' front-runners: Democrats Michael S. Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, Republicans George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000.

The only time that did not occur was in 1992, when Maryland's March 3 primary actually preceded the year's Super Tuesday by a week. Maryland Democrats favored former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas by 40.6 percent to 33.5 percent for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. But Tsongas, though he won the earlier New Hampshire primary and won Super Tuesday contests a week later in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, soon was eliminated from a nominating contest that Clinton went on to win.

Thus, the phrase "Maryland" primary still is most associated with one of the ugliest incidents in presidential campaign history: the attempted assassination of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, a right-wing Democratic candidate for president, during a 1972 rally at a shopping center in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Laurel.

Wallace - whose assailant was seeking fame rather than carrying out a political agenda - was a Southern populist whose base was among blue-collar whites angered by the Democratic Party's turn toward liberalism. Wallace won upset victories in Maryland and Michigan that May 16. But grievous gunshot wounds that left his lower body paralyzed prevented Wallace from continuing in a nominating campaign won by his ideological opposite, liberal South Dakota Sen. George S. McGovern.

This year's primary gives Maryland a chance to have an impact on presidential nominating politics in the more positive sense.

The state, which is typically a Democratic Party stronghold in general elections, offers 99 of the 240 delegates possessed among the two states and the District of Columbia. Only voters registered as Democrats are allowed to vote in the party's "closed" primary.

These voters have an opportunity to help Illinois Sen. Barack Obama continue the roll that he started by essentially breaking even on Super Tuesday with his rival for the nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and then sweeping voting events held over the past weekend in Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska and the state of Washington. But the state could reverse the trend, and help Clinton regain her long-held footing as the party's front-runner, if its voters prefer her.

Obama is now widely seen as favored to win Maryland, in part because African-Americans - heavily concentrated in Baltimore and in the Prince George's County suburbs of Washington, D.C. - make up more than a quarter of the state's population and an even bigger share of the Democratic primary electorate. Obama, who is seeking to become the nation's first black president, has dominated the black vote in the states that already have gone in the Democratic campaign.

He has endorsements from Maryland African-American leaders, including Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon and 7th District Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Rep. Albert R. Wynn and lawyer Donna Edwards, the leading candidates in Tuesday's heated Democratic primary in the black-majority 4th Congressional District, both have endorsed Obama.

Obama has also showed appeal, according to exit polls, among affluent white Democratic voters, of which Maryland has plenty, particularly in Montgomery County in suburban Washington. Among his supporters is state Comptroller Peter Franchot, a Montgomery County resident.

Clinton, though, is hoping to evoke the positive sentiments many state Democrats felt toward her and her husband, Bill Clinton, who easily carried Maryland in both the 1992 and 1996 general elections for president. Hillary Clinton could do well in Baltimore County, which surrounds the state's largest city and has a fair number of white blue-collar workers, and in rural parts of the state, particularly southern Maryland with its more conservative bent. She could hold her own in Montgomery County, which also has a large concentration of Hispanic voters, a constituency that has favored her in other states.

Clinton has been endorsed by many state Democratic leaders, including Gov. Martin O’Malley; Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski; Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, who is African-American; and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of the largely suburban 2nd Congressional District mostly north of Baltimore.

Democratic Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, Maryland's other major statewide officeholder, has stayed neutral so far in the presidential race.

Democrats allocate their pledged delegates proportionately based on the primary vote, with 24 distributed based on the statewide votes and 46 disbursed among the state's eight congressional district and divided based on the district vote totals. Maryland has 29 superdelegates, who are officially unpledged party leaders and elected officials.

On the Republican side, Maryland would appear to be favorable turf for McCain, the former Vietnam War POW who was a 1958 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in the state capital of Annapolis. His biography has appeal to the many Maryland Republicans with military backgrounds. And his image as a "maverick" Republican may resonate with the more centrist Republican voters in places such as suburban Washington and Baltimore. McCain recently was endorsed by Republican former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., whose political base is in the Baltimore suburbs.

Yet Maryland's Republican electorate is not that much less conservative than GOP voters in other states - as was evident in 2000, when george W. Bush, then governor of Texas, rolled over McCain by 56 percent to 36 percent. Huckabee, hoping to add to his wins this weekend in Kansas and Louisiana and his near-miss against McCain in Washington state , is targeting this conservative constituency.

Maryland, though its demographics and politics are largely Northeastern, is below the historic Mason-Dixon Line. And some parts of the state - especially the Eastern Shore region located in the 1st Congressional District and the Western Panhandle region in the 6th District - have Southern-accented cultures, conservative voting tendencies and large numbers of evangelical Christians who could be attracted to Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister.

State Republicans, who also have a closed primary, use a modified winner-take-all system in their presidential primary. Ten of the 37 delegates go to the statewide winner; the other 24 are divided equally among the eight congressional districts, with each district's winner getting all three of its delegates. The party leaders are given officially unpledged delegate slots.