Remember when I warned y’all about watching the delegate count? Yeah, I’ll brag a little. It takes incredible foresight to, um, pay attention to the rules of the Democratic nomination process.

Here are the preliminary gains, according to the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama grabbed the early lead in the competition for delegates in Tuesday’s primaries.

Obama won at least 69 delegates in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won at least 63 delegates, with 55 still to be awarded.

An Indiana estimate slightly earlier in the evening, from Matt Seyfang, via Ben Smith:

Matt Seyfang, a former campaign delegate counter who tracks this stuff for us, e-mails over his estimated margins: Clinton +2 in Indiana, Obama +17, net +15 for Obama.

Seyfang writes:

Lake is still out, but I’m assuming the 1st goes 4-2 for Obama based on surrounding counties that Clinton won. He won’t break the 70 percent he needs for a 5-1 margin. The statewide assumes a 2-point margin for Clinton, still a big question mark with Lake out.

What’s interesting if these numbers hold is that this assures that Obama will win a majority of the 3,253 pledged delegates [excluding Florida and Michigan]. He’s now at 1,494. Under this set of numbers, he picks up 101 for a total of 1,595. A majority is 1,627, so he’s 33 short. If you assume he makes threshold in each of the remaining 24 districts for one delegate and then picks up at least one PLEO and one at-large in each of the 6 remaining contests, he’s at 1,631. The battle for the majority of pledged delegates is over.

Here’s Indiana by congressional district/county overlap and then by county winner—if I were more tech savvy I could get you an overlay, but no dice.

Counties tally votes, but congressional districts dole out the delegates. So Obama’s strong showing in Lake (northwest corner) gets diluted by the whiter, richer Porter county next door, as well as >90%-white counties just to the south. I actually think Seyfang overestimated the turnout in Gary—it doesn’t look like Obama is going to make the 58.3% threshold to pull out a 4-2 win in the 1st. Saint Joseph and Elkhart Counties, which also went for Obama, are divided down the middle between the 2nd and 3rd congressional districts—delegate ties look likely there too. Indianapolis’s Marion County has a congressional district practically to itself, so Obama has probably pulled out a 4-2 split there. And so it goes.

The low-hanging fruit, as I wrote earlier, was in the 6th. They have an uneven number of delegates, who whoever gets more votes grabs an easy delegate—no 58.3% threshold here. But Clinton seems to have coasted through the 6th. Ball State University didn’t come through.

These CQ projections are looking fairly strong, from what I can tell: They guessed the CD delegates at 24 for Clinton, 23 for Obama. The at-large delegates awarded according to the statewide margin should split 8-8, because Clinton is under 53.1% overall. She’ll pick up a PLEO, because there’s an uneven number of them. Which would give Clinton a two-delegate net gain in Indiana, just as Seyfang predicted, but through a slightly different route.

Two delegates? North Carolina will dwarf that shit.