Senator Barack Obama is poised to reach a milestone in the presidential race on Tuesday by capturing a majority of pledged delegates, but he said he would not declare victory against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or suggest the Democratic primary should end until the final three contests are finished on June 3.
For Mr. Obama, the situation is delicate. While eager to proceed to a general election match with Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, Mr. Obama is also trying to bring the contest to a close in a way that allows him to win over Mrs. Clinton’s supporters and unify the party.
For her part, Mrs. Clinton is making a counterargument that she is winning the popular vote if Florida and Michigan are counted, and that the party’s leaders should take that into consideration before deciding which candidate to support.
The results from the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday will almost certainly allow Mr. Obama to reach a threshold that his campaign has long sought to establish as the critical measure of the will of the party: winning a majority of the delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses. He also continues to gather support from the party leaders known as superdelegates that he still needs to secure the nomination, picking up five more endorsements on Monday.
Mr. Obama does not want to appear as if he is pushing Mrs. Clinton out of the race, preferring instead to treat her gracefully as a worthy Democratic fighter, not as a stubborn nemesis.
He issued a directive to his campaign not to overtly declare victory at a rally on Tuesday in Iowa, a sentiment he telegraphed in Montana on Monday where he appealed for support in the state’s June 3 primary.
“We still have a number of contests, including Montana, before we’re able to secure the nomination,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to an audience in Billings. “Senator Clinton has run a magnificent race, and she is still working hard, as am I, for all of these last primary contests.”
Yet David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Mr. Obama, was a bit blunter as he previewed the milestone in a note to supporters on Monday.
“A clear majority of elected delegates will send an unmistakable message — the people have spoken, and they are ready for change,” Mr. Plouffe said. “As we near victory in one contest, the next challenge is already heating up. President Bush and Senator McCain have begun coordinating their attacks on Barack Obama in an effort to extend their failed policies for a third term.”
Complicating the matter for Mr. Obama has been Mrs. Clinton’s promotion of a rival definition of who is ahead.
Mrs. Clinton spent Monday in Kentucky arguing that she leads in the national popular vote, and that superdelegates would be wise to take notice and not risk ignoring the will of voters.
She and her campaign have portrayed Mr. Obama as presumptuously claiming the nomination, aided by Washington pundits who have been all but crowning him as the Democratic nominee even before the primaries are complete.
“This is nowhere near over,” Mrs. Clinton said of the nomination fight at a campaign stop on Monday in Maysville, Ky.
Referring to the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries, she added, “None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that.”
Mrs. Clinton’s strategy centers on claiming a lead in the popular vote, assuming the results of the unofficial primaries in Michigan and Florida are counted.
It may be the final argument in her arsenal, and while it fits with her self-styled image as a populist, it is based on a debatable premise. Most Democratic leaders believe Florida and Michigan should not be counted fully because they held primaries in defiance of party rules. Both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton agreed not to campaign there, and Mr. Obama even took his name off the ballot in Michigan.
“The fact is we have to include Michigan and Florida — we cannot claim that we have a nominee based on 48 states, particularly two states that are so important for us to win in the fall,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday in Maysville.
The arguments over the cold math of the nomination contest play out against a backdrop of two states that are likely to once more reveal deep divisions among Democratic voters: Mr. Obama is expected to win sizably in Oregon, a largely white, affluent state with a fairly liberal Democratic base, while Mrs. Clinton is expected to win in Kentucky, which has a strong working-class vote.
Mrs. Clinton won a commanding victory last Tuesday in neighboring West Virginia, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually evident factor for some Democratic voters, according to exit polls. Both Clinton and Obama advisers say they are unsure if this will happen again in Kentucky, but they do not rule it out; Clinton advisers add that they believe race was a relatively small factor in West Virginia.
But even if Mrs. Clinton does win in Kentucky, Mr. Obama is likely to end the day with a majority of the delegates awarded through the nominating contests, a threshold his campaign has long asserted would represent a definitive judgment by voters. By its calculation, the campaign believes it is 14.5 delegates away from that benchmark; hitting it could lead to an increased flow of support from uncommitted superdelegates.
If all states with popular vote totals are counted — which would exclude four caucus states that have not released numbers — Mrs. Clinton would lead Mr. Obama by more than 26,000 votes out of more than 33 million cast. By other calculations, Mr. Obama is ahead in the popular vote.
The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee will meet on May 31 to consider how to count Michigan and Florida in the nomination fight, if at all. Mr. Obama is aiming now toward accumulating 2,025 delegates, the number needed for the nomination if Michigan and Florida are left out. The Clinton campaign is arguing that the delegate goal will be higher because the two states should be counted.
Even when a majority of delegates are pledged to Mr. Obama, his advisers know the Democratic nominating fight is not over. In the next two weeks, Mr. Obama intends to campaign for all three remaining contests — in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana — but turning attention to Mr. McCain at each stop along the way.
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