BALTIMORE (Map, News) - For the first time in 40 years, Indiana Democrats are approaching the prospect May 6 of having a significant voice in the selection of their party’s presidential nominee.

Not since Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York beat Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota in the Hoosier State in 1968 — the first big step of Kennedy’s ill-fated dash for the party’s nomination — has Indiana been in the spotlight in a national campaign.

New registration of about 200,000 voters and huge turnouts for rallies by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton signaled intense interest even before last Tuesday’s primary in Pennsylvania, won by Clinton by an impressive 10 percentage points. She now hopes that victory and demographic similarities in Indiana will enable her to continue her late surge.

A new poll by The Indianapolis Star and station WTHR has Obama ahead by only 41 percent to 38 percent in the state. Clinton has managed to stay in the race by replicating in Pennsylvania the support she won in the Ohio primary among white, older, blue-collar workers, and she needs to do the same in Indiana. Obama must make a larger dent among the same voters, with the matter of his race looming as a serious hurdle.

Indiana seldom has been regarded as a key primary battleground. In 1968, it became one only because the state was holding the first primary for which the late-entering Kennedy was eligible. So he rushed into Indiana against McCarthy and President Lyndon Johnson, who subsequently decided not to seek re-election.

This year, Indiana declined to join the stampede of states moving up their primaries into February, and it is now being rewarded with the attention it never would have received had the state followed so many others. With the Pennsylvania primary not decisive in settling the Obama-Clinton fight, the campaign focus has moved to Indiana. North Carolina, with a large African-American population, will also vote on May 6, but Obama is more clearly favored there.

In 1968, the Indiana primary confirmed Kennedy’s huge appeal to young and anti-Vietnam War voters. It carried him to subsequent victories in Nebraska and California before the tragic end of his campaign on primary night in Los Angeles.

This year, Indiana will provide a measurement of the current comparisons between RFK and Obama, another young and charismatic candidate running against a different war in Iraq. Though Obama shares Kennedy’s 1968 anti-war message along with one of optimism about the future, there are significant differences in this coming Indiana primary from the one in which Kennedy demonstrated his appeal to a similar constituency.

By the time of the primary here 40 years ago, Kennedy’s prime target, Johnson, had dropped out of the race and then-Gov. Roger Branigan was running as a stand-in, first for LBJ and then for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who inherited the Democratic establishment mantle. Neither Branigan nor McCarthy could derail the Kennedy surge.

Indiana bears a history of early establishment of the Ku Klux Klan and conservatism in the southern Appalachian regions of the state. In 1968, Kennedy played to it with a strong law-and-order pitch similar to the one Republican nominee Richard Nixon employed successfully in the fall campaign that year.

But Indiana has undergone considerable change over the past 40 years, and the issue of race here as elsewhere has been modulated as a vocal element in campaign discussion. However, the recent flare-up over Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the minister of his black church in Chicago, has revived it somewhat.

Obama argued in New Albany on the southern Indiana border the other day that his problem in winning white voters was more a question of their age than race, saying “older voters are very loyal to Senator Clinton.” The latest Indiana poll bears that out, giving her a wide 55-20 bulge over him among voters age 55 and older.

Forty years ago, Robert Kennedy won the Indiana primary in part as a result of his inspirational and charismatic appeal to the young. Today in Indiana it may take Obama’s similar style and appeal to younger voters to overcome the resistance of senior Hoosiers.

Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington, D.C., for more than 50 years. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, “Very Strange Bedfellows,” has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.