Sen. Hillary Clinton doggedly continued her campaign through South Dakota Monday in the face of near-certain defeat.
Analysts say Sen. Barack Obama, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, will likely have the delegates he needs to claim victory sometime this week.
Clinton hasn't said when or if she'll drop out of the race, but Monday, her husband Bill Clinton may have dropped a big hint. In Milbank, S.D., the former president prefaced a speech by telling the crowd: "I want to say ... that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind."
South Dakota and Montana will hold the last two elections Tuesday in the Democratic primary season that began in Iowa in early January.
Clinton will be delivering her post-primaries speech in New York on Tuesday, CTV's Tom Clark told Â鶹´«Ã½net on Monday.
Clark said Hillary Clinton's staffers have been told they can either attend the event in New York or go home to await further instructions.
Lorenzo Morris, a political science professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., told Newsnet that there's been substantial pressure on Clinton to make a move by June 3.
Clinton is a realistic person, and she wants to ensure her future within the Democratic Party, he said.
Raising doubts
Throughout the weekend, Clinton didn't sound like someone about to give up.
On Sunday, Clinton suggested she was trying to woo back "superdelegates" who have pledged support for Obama.
"One thing about superdelegates is that they can change their minds," she told reporters aboard her campaign plane Sunday night.
Superdelegates are party officials, elected politicians and others who have an automatic right to vote at the Democrats' nominating convention in Denver this August.
Clinton argued she leads in the popular vote, but relies on the results of the disputed Michigan and Florida primaries.
Neither candidate campaigned in those states. Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan.
The Democrats' rules committee decided Saturday that delegates from the two states will get half-votes at the convention because the primaries were moved up to January in defiance of the Democratic National Committee.
The committee gave Clinton 69 Michigan delegates and Obama 59. Clinton is still considering an appeal of the ruling.
She is unable to catch Obama through elected delegates alone, despite her big win in Puerto Rico's primary on Sunday.
Obama is favoured in both South Dakota and Montana. He has 2,069 delegates, 47 away from sealing the nomination. Clinton has 1,915.5 delegates.
The Democrats' system of proportional allocation means neither candidate is likely to capture an overwhelming majority of the remaining delegates. Both will need superdelegates to put them over the top.
"This has been such an intense process," said Clinton. "I don't think there has been a lot of time for reflection. It's only now that we're finishing these contests that (superdelegates) are going to actually reflect on who is our stronger candidate."
Pressure to wrap up
But even some Clinton supporters are getting uncomfortable with attempts to drag out the process.
"It does appear to be pretty clear that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee. After Tuesday's contests, she needs to acknowledge that he's going to be the nominee and quickly get behind him," said Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa and national co-chair of the Clinton campaign.
Senior party leaders such as Howard Dean, the party's chair, have said they want the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to make up their minds and end the race before month's end.
In Mitchell, S.D., on Sunday, Obama told a crowd that Clinton "is going to be a great asset when we go into November.
"Whatever differences Senator Clinton and I may have, those differences pale in comparison to the other side," he said.
With files from The Associated Press
