NC & IN: What do you want to see in a Delegate Tracker Thread?

I've been flattered by the nice response I've received for my delegate tracker threads following the Texas district and county caucuses and the Pennsylvania primary. Posting and maintaining them is tiring, but it's fun--and let's face it, I would be staying up (along with thousands of my fellow Kossacks) long into the night on these primary nights whether I had a Kos thread to update or not.

As you may have heard, North Carolina and Indiana will be holding primaries this coming Tuesday, May 6. I'm willing to give this another shot for those primaries--so the question now is: what would you like to see in a Delegate Tracker Thread next Tuesday night?

First, the not-very-negotiable stuff. The May 6 thread will necessarily have a modified version of the Pennsylvania results table. A table like that one, of course, is the whole point of the diary.

I'm also pretty well sold on the--ahem--obscure "INF+2N" statistic that I've dreamed up and put in that table. To my (woefully undereducated re: statistics) mind, a field like that does an important service identifying which districts have a reasonable chance of flipping and which don't.

And I think the "purty pictures" element of the threads ought to stay; obviously those .jpgs aren't particularly functional, but they do make the whole diary easier on the eyes, I think. (I stole the idea from PocketNines' Wyoming results diary, which is full of gorgeous shots.)

Other elements are more optional. In the Texas thread, I wrote quite a bit (here's Part 1 and Part 2) of contextual stuff about the state of the race going into that weekend's caucuses. In the Pennsylvania version, I wrote somewhat less--partially because that primary was considerably less complicated than the Texas caucuses, and partially because I thought that the national-context stuff was better known by that point. What do you think--is the "broader national context" math important to have in a thread like this one for North Carolina and Indiana?

I also tracked a few other numbers in the Pennsylvania thread:  most notably, the popular vote. Some of my fellow Obama supporters were (perhaps understandably) annoyed at me about that section. I still think the popular-vote tally is important to keep track of, bogus though the Clinton campaign's argument is; should I drop it?

Then, in the Pennsylvania thread, I had a table comparing five prognosticators' projections for the results of the various delegate races. That'll be a little more complicated with two states to cover (especially since everyone and her aunt seems to be posting NC and/or IN delegate projections within the last few days), but I'm happy to put together a similar table for May 6 if people are interested.

Finally are issues of process. In Pennsylvania, I got almost all of my raw numbers from USA Today's site--the only one I've seen that actually reports vote totals by Congressional District (which is relevant to delegate races), rather than by county (which isn't). I'd prefer an official state-government site if it had similarly useful data, though Pennsylvania's Secretary of State site was both (1) many minutes behind the major media sites and (2) devoid of district numbers. Things were better on March 4 for the "Mini-Super Tuesday" primaries, when both Texas and Ohio had official government sites churning out all the necessary primary numbers. If anyone has a line on similar sites in North Carolina or Indiana, I'm all ears!

I've been in e-mail touch with a few Kossacks who have offered IT help to streamline the process of getting the numbers from (a) USA Today's (or whatever) site to (b) my big fat Numbers v. 1.0.1 spreadsheet that does all the math to (c) the diary. If those software solutions work out, my turnaround time ought to be a bit better than the twenty-or-so minutes I was running on Pennsylvania night. If I'm not able to make them work, maybe Kos will once again conclude that I've gone to bed three hours before I actually do. (Aaargh!)

Anyway--what say you, Kossacks? Which elements of the delegate tracker threads have worked, and which haven't? What should we add? What would make the North Carolina and Indiana thread even more fabulous?