We’ve gotten a surprising number of emails from readers and friends alike asking if we could provide any insight on tomorrow’s D.C. Democratic State Committee election. This only applies to those of you who are registered Democrats, but since we gather that’s rather a lot of you, here’s a little bit of background information to help you make your decision.

If you’ve consulted your voter guide already, you’ve noticed that there are three groups of candidates running variously for National Committeewoman, Committeeman, At-large Democratic State Committee seats, and State Committee Ward Members. These are all basically positions that represent D.C.’s Democratic voters within the national Democratic Party, as well as on the Ward and State level. If you aren’t one of the 200 or so people in this city who closely follows internal D.C. Democratic Party politics, you can be forgiven for not having any idea who some of these people on your ballots are or why you should vote for one of them and not the other.

To help make things theoretically easier, the candidates have formed into three slates, with the idea being you should pick one slate and vote for all the candidates in that group. But since the three slate names are 1) Obama for Change, 2) Obama4UnityBeatsMcCain and 3) Obama for DC, the effect instead is much confusion, one could argue even deliberately so.

The Post’s David Nakamura last month wrote about part of the difference between these groups: some of them were early Obama supporters but are relatively new to local party activism, while others have been involved for a long time and may or may not have been big time Clinton supporters (but who are now of course campaigning for Obama). There’s a sense that the Obama4UnityBeatsMcCain slate has formed because they believe it is time, like their candidate says, for “Change.” A not dissimilar event happened in 2004, when a number of enthusiastic Howard Dean supporters successfully joined the committee.