It's the last voting day: What's next? (Updated: AP hints at concession tonight, CNN disagrees)

Welcome to the last presidential voting day until November 4th. The last presidential primary is upon us, and yet all eyes are fixed on New York, not on South Dakota and Montana. There have been no Zogby tracking polls, no wall-to-wall CNN coverage from Helena or Rapid City. Instead, every single one of Hillary Clinton's movements has been scrutinized for clues as to her plans: Will she drop out tonight? Will she give an uncommitted speech and drop out in the coming days once Obama reaches 2,118 delegates? Or is her campaign serious about its repeated threats to continue their quest all the way to the Denver convention?

There no longer is an obvious route for her campaign to take. For the past three months, Clinton had been avoiding the pressure to drop out by claiming she had to stay in until every voter was able to vote and she kept herself busy by campaigning full time, traveling to states that were holding primaries (even Puerto Rico last week-end).

After tonight, she can continue her quest for the nomination, but with what rationale? In a statement yesterday, Clinton laid out the case for her candidacy:

Tomorrow is the last day of the primaries and the beginning of a new phase in the campaign. After South Dakota and Montana vote I will lead in the popular vote and Senator Obama will lead in the delegate count. The voters will have voted and so the decision will fall to the delegates empowered to vote at the Democratic Convention. I will be spending the coming days making my case to those delegates.

Clinton is trying to put herself on par with Obama, as if both had won one of the counts, putting them on equal footing. But the popular vote argument is a difficult one for her to make as she would have been in a stronger position had she surpassed Obama with a count that includes all the caucus states. Instead, the best count in which Clinton is ahead is one that includes Michigan and grants the uncommitted to Obama but does not include estimates for four caucus states that have not released raw numbers. Note that these numbers could change again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign will try to make it easier for Clinton to take her decision by ensuring that the third option no longer be on the table once Hillary, Bill and her team meet to discuss the end game. They do not want to appear to be pressuring her to drop out, but they are working overtime to ensure that enough superdelegates endorse them from this afternoon to tomorrow evening for the threshold to be crossed sometime soon. And there are many reports circulating that dozens of superdelegates -- particularly House members but perhaps even Senators, as Ken Salazar and Tom Harkin (both undeclared right now) are pressuring their colleagues -- will rally behind the Illinois Senator starting tonight.

In other words, Obama is likely to surpass 2,118 in the coming days -- and probably open up a substantial margin. The question then for Clinton is no longer to justify to superdelegates why they should endorse her (and thus have a reason to stay in the race) but justify why she is staying in the race after Obama has clinched a majority of delegates.

Her first rationale is Michigan, which does remain on the table, but that would only give Hillary so many delegates. And remember that her statement after the Rules & Bylaws meeting appeared to suggest that she would not push for a full seating of the Florida and Michigan delegations, concentrating instead only on the allocation of Michigan delegates. Second, her claim that superdelegates can change their mind offers her an argument that is technically true, though it is difficult to see why supers would cross back to the Clinton camp once Obama is declared the winner both by his own campaign and by the media.

She can still travel around the country, but what would she be campaigning for? Is she supposed to pretend like she's concentrating on the general election and hold events in the fall's battleground states? Should she try and put pressure on uncommitted delegates by traveling to their district?

Thus, Clinton will be in an even more difficult position than she has been these past few weeks once Obama substantially crosses 2,118, as that would remove the two arguments Clinton could have to stay in the race beyond that point, superdelegates changing their minds and the Michigan delegation. Perhaps the Clinton campaign can hope that two giant upsets tonight in SD and MT would give pause to the superdelegates, but those two states are not big enough to shift numbers much.

Of course, the Clinton campaign probably feels frustrated that it has done so well in so many states since the beginning of March without it having changed anything to the equation. But her challenge had become clear as soon as the dust settled on Obama's February streak. She needed to make something happen and she had no room for a single error. Her victories in Ohio, Pennsylvania were not big enough to satisfy the former condition, and her stumble in North Carolina was all Obama needed to wrap this up.

Update: Well, it looks like there is less suspense about Clinton's plans than expected, as the AP is reporting that Clinton will concede that Obama has enough delegates to win the nomination in her speech tonight (presumably under the condition that Obama lives up to his favorite status in SD and MT?). The WaPo reports that five Montana superdelegates, including the governor and the two senators, will endorse the winner of their state's primary as soon as it is called, confirming that we are likely to see a lot of endorsements starting tonight (Politico suggests as many as 28 look set to endorse by the time Obama speaks tonight) and Terry McAuliffe said today that, as soon as Obama gets a majority of delegates, "I think Hillary Clinton will congratulate him and call him the nominee."

But CNN is reporting that the Clinton campaign is denying the AP report and says they have no plan to concede the delegate race tonight. It indeed seems likely that such plans would be set in stone before it becomes clear whether Obama will reach 2,118 today. In any case, all this talk confirms that Clinton is unlikely to try to hard once her rival reaches that number and clues of a Clinton concession tonight or at least in the coming days are accumulating.