Finally, as nightfall approached and it became clear that the committee would soon rule against him anyway, Ickes leaned into his microphone and threatened to pick up his ball and go home. His exact words were, “Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” but the effect was the same: The Clinton forces didn’t get their way and responded by threatening to spoil any effort to unify the party before the August convention.

Ickes’ bluster was greeted with defiant chants of “Denver! Denver!” from the band of Clinton supporters who had made their way into the meeting hall and was quickly followed by an official statement from the Clinton campaign echoing his threat of a credentials fight this summer.

There’s no telling how long, or even whether, the angriest of the Clinton supporters will take to get on board with the party’s nominee. But as far as the threats from the campaign of keeping the fight going for the whole summer: it’s all hot air.

The actual date that Clinton will quit the race is anyone’s guess, but it’s coming – and fast. As a result of Saturday’s R.B.C. session, the new magic delegate number in the Democratic race is 2,118 – up from the 2,026 figure that has prevailed while Florida and Michigan sat in limbo. After the final primaries next Tuesday, Barack Obama will need to win over – at most – about 25 of the remaining 200 or so uncommitted superdelegates into order to clinch the nomination.

The new math comes courtesy of the R.B.C.’s decision to accept the results from Florida’s outlaw January primary but to give each delegate only half a vote. Michigan’s votes were also halved, but because of the particularly flawed nature of that state’s primary – Barack Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot, in case you haven’t heard – the state’s 128 pledged delegates will not be apportioned based solely on the primary results. Instead, the panel accepted a compromise that gives Clinton 69 delegates (she sought 73) and Obama 59 (he’d asked for an even 64-64 split), each with only a half-vote at the convention.

While the Clinton campaign had argued against reducing the value of each delegate’s vote, they seemed to accept the Florida decision, which will yield a net gain of about 14 delegates for them (depending on how many John Edwards-pledged delegates side with Obama).

But it was the Michigan ruling that prompted Ickes’ threat-making. The state’s delegates, he contended, should be apportioned based exclusively on the January primary, in which Clinton won 55 percent and “uncommitted” took 40. Such an interpretation would have given 73 delegates to Clinton and 55 to uncommitted. (Those 55, Ickes reasoned, would then be up for grabs for either candidate to win over). When the final compromise was introduced, Ickes pronounced himself “stunned that we have the gall and the chutzpah to substitute our judgment for the judgment of 600,000 voters.”

“Was the (primary) flawed? You bet your ass it was flawed,” he snarled. “It’s hard to find an election in the United States that isn’t flawed.”

To compare the conditions of the January Michigan primary with the routine kinks that accompany any election – like, say, a polling station improperly closing a few minutes early – is absurd on its face.

In Michigan, two of three major candidates who were actively campaigning on January 15 – Obama and John Edwards – weren’t even on the ballot and voters had been told for months that the contest wouldn’t count (something Clinton herself even said publicly). None of the candidates campaigned in the state and hundreds of thousands of voters either stayed home (turnout in the Democratic primary was dramatically off the pace of every state that voted this year, save Florida) or opted to participate in the Republican primary held on the same day. These are not your everyday flaws and the outcome can hardly be considered a fair and reasonable reflection of the state’s Democrats.

Of course, had the roles at the meeting been reversed and had it been Obama – and not Clinton – in desperate need of extra delegates out of Florida and Michigan, you can bet that his loyal allies on the committee would have been playing the same game Ickes did. And Ickes, for his part, would have been enumerating the many ways in which the vote in those two states was flawed. Clinton’s Florida and Michigan posture, no matter what grand purpose her diehard supporters may have convinced themselves of, was never about deeply held principles. It was about political convenience.

The same can be said, in fact, about the R.B.C.’s verdict, and this is the biggest single reason that Clinton’s threat of a convention fight is empty.The majority of committee members were motivated by two factors: a recognition of Obama’s inevitability, and a strong desire to end the primary process and move toward party unity. Clinton claimed 13 allies on the committee, but the vote on the Michigan compromise was 19-8. The reason for the defections was best expressed by Don Fowler, the former D.N.C. chairman and Clinton backer, who broke with her on the vote. Fowler pronounced himself displeased with the plan but, addressing Ickes across the room, declared: “Harold, this is my position, I respect and love you, but this is what I think we should do.”

In that moment, a fault line among Clinton supporters became clear. This may be close to a 50-50 race in terms of popular vote (it’s a 49.1-47.7 race, according to the Real Clear Politics tally), but a big chunk of those Clinton supporters are pragmatic and not blind in their loyalty. Much like Fowler and the other R.B.C. members who deserted her, they can read the writing on the wall and are not prepared to damage their party’s fall prospects for a gesture of devotion to Hillary Clinton.

Yes, Clinton has more than her share of supporters-for-life, like the spirited crowd that assembled in the meeting hall on Saturday, who made it clear that they would happily follow her into a fight in Denver. But the clear majority of the party is now prepared to accept Obama.

Instigating a credentials fight would be a horrific short- and long-term strategy for Clinton. She’d essentially be fighting for an extra four delegates in Michigan (and maybe a few of the “uncommitteds”) while facing an overall gap of 200 delegates (probably more, after next week). And it would almost certainly be in vain anyway, if the R.B.C. ruling is any clue. Plus, it would very possibly ruin her prospects for a 2012 campaign, should Obama lose in the fall. By taking her fight to the convention, she’d be blamed for an Obama defeat in the fall and her more pragmatic supporters (the Fowler-types who broke with her on Saturday) would feel no loyalty to her in 2012. Her base would be radically reduced.

Obama will soon declare victory, possibly as early as Tuesday, and likely by the end of next week. No matter what Harold Ickes is saying now, expect Clinton’s concession to come around the same time.

Kovner said she had not yet made a contribution to the Obama campaign, but she added, "I certainly will, as will everyone I know."

Kovner, who said she had mostly focused her energies on Senate and Congressional races this year, is not ambiguous about her reasons for supporting Obama.

"Obama's the candidate," she said. "I'm a Democrat and I have been a Democrat for a long time and I want to win in November and I don't want to continue a fight that isn't a fight anymore. And David Axelrod is somebody I have known for a long time and I wanted to hear what he had to say."

(Axelrod was the featured speaker at last night's fund-raiser.)

Kovner, who helped run Eugene McCarthy's campaign in 1968 with Harold Ickes, said she was impressed with the 50-state strategy Axelrod laid out.

"I think the party should settle on its nominee by the rules that it made and we should get on with it and take on McCain, who would be a total disaster for the country. I mean, he is worse than a continuation of George Bush if that is even possible. We just can't afford that."

"I'm very, very conscious of that," she said. "And I am very anxious to get onto the main event."

"That's a major statement on Hillary's campaign that one of her strongest advocates and one of Harold Ickes' closest associates was there," said one influential Clinton fund-raiser, when told of Kovner's attendance at the Obama fund-raiser. "That is an earthquake. Everyone recognized Hillary was down for the count, but it is a major thing for her to jump ship."

Kovner is a member of the New York Women for Hillary Council, served as the Deputy Director of the New York State Clinton-Gore campaign and was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services throughout the Clinton administrations. Active in a wide range of women's groups, she acted as a government representative to the Interagency Committee on Women’s Business Enterprise and the representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women from 1993 until 2000.

Kovner could not immediately be reached for comment.

UPDATE: Kovner says that she's declaring for Obama because the primary contest is already decided and that it's time for Democrats to come together against John McCain.

“It’s very important in politics not to make the same mistake too many times,” Penn said at the time.

As if proving those words, Penn was removed by the Clinton campaign as chief strategist, after it was revealed that he had met with officials from Colombia to push a bilateral trade treaty with the United States, a policy Hillary Clinton opposes. It wasn’t the first time Penn’s corporate work posed an apparent conflict of interest for the campaign, but this time it cost him his title, if not his association with the campaign. (He will continue to poll and advise, according to an official campaign statement.)

Now, it will be none other than Wolfson, the communications director he gently criticized in public and butted heads with in private, who will take over his primary responsibilities as the campaign’s chief message crafter.

Until now Penn had successfully dodged a barrage of bullets from Clinton campaign advisers disgruntled with his choice of tactics, his unwavering belief in the power of poll-tested messages and his chilly personality. Dating back to at least Clinton’s loss in Iowa, staffers have been privately wishing him the worst.

And yet Penn’s closeness to Bill Clinton (his Burson-Marsteller office is decorated with several framed notes of “To Mark Penn, Thanks,” from President Clinton, including one across a Washington Post with the headline reading “Clinton Acquitted”) and the confidence the candidate ultimately had in him allowed him to hold onto the title of chief strategist, one he cherished and was proud of, even as his few allies argued that his influence in the struggling campaign had waned.

It took Penn’s own doing finally to knock him out of his position at the strategic helm. It was a seemingly unthinkable blunder, putting Clinton’s main message-maker at clear odds with one of her key economic messages as she appeals to working class voters in Pennsylvania. Worse still, it came after the Clinton campaign had tirelessly attacked the Obama campaign in the run-up to the Ohio primary after a lower-level adviser apparently suggested to Canadian officials that Obama’s position on Nafta was different from what he said on the campaign trail.

And it wasn’t the first time Penn found himself facing criticism for apparent conflicts of interest between his role as a high-paid public relations man and the (high-paid) brains of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Burson-Marsteller’s work for companies seeking to thwart union organizing campaigns enraged the union activists whose support the Clinton campaign was seeking. The firm’s contract with Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, led to some uncomfortable press for a candidate who constantly rails against foreclosures and the housing crisis. And its indirect representation of the military contractor Blackwater Worldwide, whose alleged above-the-law style of operation in Iraq have made it a prime example for war critics of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the occupation, raised yet more questions about Penn’s judgment.

What infuriated Penn’s colleagues in the Clinton campaign even more was the $13 million he received from the cash-strapped Clinton campaign, even as he kept receiving his Burson-Marsteller salary.

In the February interview with The Observer, he sought to defend his level of remuneration.

“I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and mis-reporting on this,” Penn said. “This has been overwhelmingly for voter contact and direct mail, and all of it goes to companies, not to me personally, and I do not own the companies, and they are part of a Fortune 500 company. Large teams of people are involved.”

He said that more than 70 percent of the expenditures had been for direct mail, printing and postage.

But news of the Colombia meeting brought the complaints of Penn’s critics to a head.

On April 7, the campaign decided that it could not ignore this last misstep, which directly undermined Clinton’s professed support for trade deals more favorable to American workers.

“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign,” Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said in a statement. “Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign. Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.”

It is not yet clear exactly what Penn’s departure from the message team will mean for Clinton, and it could very well be too late for any of the major adjustments Wolfson has for years advocated for from within Hillaryland: that Clinton show more of her personal side and move away from the robotic predictability produced by an overreliance on Penn’s polling data.

In February, a source in the campaign, speaking on background, said that Mr. Penn’s philosophy was perfectly represented by a comment he made during one of Mrs. Clinton’s debate preps at campaign headquarters in early winter. About 15 staffers were in a room with Mrs. Clinton discussing how she could best respond to a particular line of attack. One of the aides, the source recalled, had an idea.

“I think you need to show a little bit of humanity,” said the aide.

Mr. Penn interjected. “Oh, come on, being human is overrated.”

“Everyone laughed and it broke the tension, and even he had a smile on his face,” said the source. “But it said a lot because it seemed to really encapsulate a viewpoint.”

Mr. Penn, in an interview that month, recalled the comment as self-deprecating, and was unrepentant about the campaign he had run. He asserted that to the extent that his message was heeded, it was successful. And even Penn’s enemies inside the campaign -- and they were legion -- allowed that his early work establishing Clinton as an experienced, tough-as-nails candidate had built the only foundation upon which a woman could plausibly be elected as commander in chief.

Penn often found himself shifting blame in the last few months, as his candidate lagged behind Obama in delegates and contests won.

He blamed the political ground and money game, run by former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, her deputy Mike Henry and longtime Clinton loyalist and his longtime foe Harold Ickes. What ruined it for Mrs. Clinton, he said in February, were “organization-driven” states, where she suffered defeats in “a series of caucuses that generated tremendous momentum for Obama.”

He had always done his job, he argued.

“I think that virtually every schoolchild knows that she is ‘ready on day one,’ Penn said at the time, referring to one of the slogans he designed for Mrs. Clinton. “If you look back—at the beginning she was ‘ready for change and ready to lead’ and that’s something that built a large coalition that carried her through Super Tuesday. Between then and now, there was a period where the campaign didn’t have resources to play ahead in those states it needed to campaign in.”

UPDATE: Demoted but very much not gone.

Harold Ickes said "we understand on very, very good authority" that Michigan legislators believe both campaign's consent would be necessary for a re-vote. He said that since the Clinton campaign was publicly in favor of a re-vote, the Obama campaign must be blocking the effort.

"Exhibit A," Ickes called it, adding, "The only thing we can conclude is that the Obama campaign is working key legislators."

Phil Singer said that in Florida, where a re-vote now seems very unlikely, "what is going on right now is a passive-aggressive effort on behalf of the Obama campaign to disenfranchise the voters of Florida."

Ickes continued to fight for a re-do primary there, saying that the Clinton campaign was open to a mail-in ballot, and "hiring professional organizations that does these sorts of things." Later, he vented, "It's suddenly becoming impossible to hold a vote in Florida" in the twenty-first century, even with two months' preparation. "I mean give me a break."

He said not seating Michigan and Florida was "goofy" and "dangerous" and called on the Obama campaign to come out publicly in favor of a re-vote.

UPDATE: Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor responds with the following statement.  

He was referring to a quote by Clinton campaign senior adviser Harold Ickes that appeared in the New York Times today, which the Obama campaign responded to on a conference call this afternoon. Ickes said, while discussing Barack Obama’s primary wins in states that traditionally vote Republican in the general election:

Introducing the topic of Obama’s strength in North Carolina, which holds a primary on May 6 (and is the next primary after Pennsylvania), communications director Robert Gibbs said, “[Clinton] has, quite frankly, denigrated small states, denigrated caucus states and…southern states.”

“We believe this speaks to their weakness in those states as a general election candidates,” Gibbs continued. “The general election map with the Clinton campaign will be quite small.” North Carolina Democrats, he added, want to “not just win the primary race in the state, but put their state in the Democratic column in the country.”

“Senator Obama is putting North Carolina in play,” said Butterfield after Gibbs had finished speaking. “It’s wonderful news for North Carolina.’

“I just don’t accept the notion that North Carolinians are just going to vote against the Democratic candidate,” Butterfield told reporters listening in. “[Obama is] going to bring his message, not only to young people, not only to minorities, but to everyone.”

“We have so much to offer,” continued Buttterfield. “We are a progressive state…Democrats can win North Carolina.”

Mr. Nugen, Barack Obama’s 36-year-old national political director, is also a shadow operative charged with winning over individual superdelegates, something the Obama campaign is officially not interested in doing, since they also say that superdelegates should be guided by the will of voters instead of come-ons from campaigns.

The Obama campaign has thus far kept him out of the media spotlight, and when they caught wind of an interview with The Observer that he had arranged and confirmed via telephone and e-mail, Mr. Nugen vanished.

And yet he—along with an aggressive superdelegate-outreach program at the Obama campaign—is for real.

“Matt is the unassuming guy that you don’t realize he’s got stroke until you see Obama come in, and he is right there,” said Moses Mercado, an Obama supporter and superdelegate who is friends with Mr. Nugen.

“We don’t have the ex-president stuff, and it’s hard to get Obama to make some of the calls,” said Mr. Mercado. “So a lot of them will say, ‘Look, I’ll wait for the call from the senator,’ but you’ll get either [campaign manager David] Plouffe or Matt to make the call and seal the deal.”

“They have a two-pronged approach,” Tom Ochs, a Democratic consultant with the firm McMahon Squier Lapp, said about the Obama campaign. “Publicly, they don’t want superdelegates to overrule the will of the voters in the form of pledged delegates. Privately, they have built this insurance policy of superdelegates who they continue to roll out relentlessly, day after day. Matt is central to that effort.”

The Obama campaign’s painstakingly low-profile superdelegate counter is, in a way, the perfect symbol for their surreptitious superdelegate operation.

Mr. Nugen is an African-American political operative from St. Louis who worked on Joe Lieberman’s presidential campaign and then at the Democratic Leadership Council, before returning to the DNC, where he counted noses for Howard Dean’s successful 2005 bid for chairman.

Now Mr. Nugen and the Obama campaign are up against an effort headed by longtime Clinton loyalist and Democratic über-operative Harold Ickes; the Clinton team is counting on the Democratic VIP’s with an automatic seat at the convention to hand Mrs. Clinton the White House.

Ivan Holmes, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, knows what it is like to be courted by the Clinton campaign’s aggressive superdelegate outreach program.

First, he received a warm phone call from Bill Clinton. Then, Hillary Clinton called a couple days before the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries.

“She said she thought it was going to go down to the end and that the superdelegates would decide it,” said Mr. Holmes. “Then she said, ‘You know, I did win in Oklahoma.’ She just made the statement that since she did so well, she hoped that I’d consider supporting her.”

After the candidate’s off-message appeal to his sense of loyalty to his state’s decision—the Clinton campaign has laid groundwork for the superdelegate push by encouraging them to decide independent of what their state’s voters do—Mr. Holmes received another call, just a few days ago, from a Clinton campaign staffer targeting his independent streak.

“She asked an interesting question,” Mr. Holmes said of the campaign staffer, whose name he said he did not remember. “If the pledged delegate difference was 50, 60 or 80 delegates, would that make a difference in who you voted for?’ I told her it wouldn’t and that I never vote on who I think is going to win.”

The Clinton campaign currently holds an estimated 255 committed superdelegates to Mr. Obama’s 214.

Mr. Nugen’s friends think he could give the Obama operation an edge.

“Matt’s an emerging Harold Ickes,” said Brad Queisser, vice president and managing director at the government relations firm mCapitol Management.

Mr. Queisser, a former DNC official, came to Washington from Nebraska in 1998 and met Mr. Nugen who was then working in the office of the secretary at the DNC.

Citing Mr. Nugen’s “steady and methodical” manner, Mr. Queisser invited him into meetings and later watched him become a special assistant in the office of the national chair. They worked together on the Bush-Gore recount in Tallahassee and eventually Mr. Nugen went on to head up Chairman Dean’s office in 2005; select the site for the convention in Denver; and become an expert on all things convention-related.

“He knows all of these players pretty well,” Mr. Queisser said. “In a superdelegate list, he probably has a personal relationship with 80 to 85 percent of those people, and that has to be valuable to a presidential campaign.”

But the only audience that counts for Mr. Nugen’s efforts are the superdelegates themselves. The reviews of his operation are mixed.

Belkis “Bel” Leong-Hong, an at-large committee member and Maryland-based chair of the DNC’s Asian-American and Pacific Islander caucus, said of Nugen, “He’s a very nice guy,” but complained that some of the Obama campaign’s outreach had been too aggressive.

“I’ve been inundated with phone calls and letters,” she said. “Definitely, the Obama campaign has been very aggressive. It’s actually been disconcerting in some ways. You expect these phone calls and letters to be gently nudging calls, but I received a couple that were less than friendly. Let’s just say that’s not the kind of tactics I expected.”

Ms. Leong-Hong described herself as “very uncommitted,” especially because she wanted to hear more from the candidates on Asian issues, but said that she was in no way swayed by Mr. Obama’s landslide victory in Maryland.

“I’m still waiting,” she said. “There are still all these races to go through.”

On the afternoon of March 10, the Obama campaign announced the endorsement of Mississippi-based lawyer and superdelegate Everett Sanders. Shortly afterward, Mr. Sanders described how he had been wooed.

First, fellow superdelegate and Mississippi national committeewoman Johnnie Patton softened him up for months with talk of Mr. Obama’s virtues. Then, about three weeks ago, he received a call from an old DNC employee now at the campaign, and then from another staffer who wanted to confirm Mr. Sanders had made up his mind.

Early Monday morning, the campaign sought permission for a press release, which was sent out to reporters and picked up on blogs as more evidence of the Obama campaign’s strength.

“I have not received a call from the Clinton campaign that I am aware of,” said Mr. Sanders.

Jennifer Moore, the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party and a superdelegate, said she was waiting until her state voted before deciding what candidate to endorse. But in the meantime, she had received pitches from such high-profile supporters as Michelle Obama and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. (Chelsea Clinton and Terry McAuliffe have been calling her, too.)

By contrast, Mr. Holmes, the Oklahoma party chairman, said that he had received no such attention.

“It’s really been weird,” said Mr. Holmes about the lack of a press from the Obama campaign. “I haven’t heard from anyone high in the Obama campaign.”

“Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.

“Now, he has been circumscribed to some extent by Maggie Williams,” said Ickes, who then pointed out that that was only a recent development.

When asked about the assertion by one senior Clinton official the campaign was effectively run by committee, diluting Penn’s authority, Ickes was incredulous.

“I don’t know what campaign you’re talking about,” said Ickes. “I have been at meetings where he introduces himself as the campaign’s chief strategist. I’ve heard him call himself that many times, say, ‘I am the chief strategist.’”

Asked if Penn preferred the title of chief strategist to pollster, Ickes said, “Prefer it? He insists on it!”

When asked if Penn was therefore responsible for the campaign’s strategy, Ickes said, “It’s pretty plain for anyone to see that he has shaped the strategy of the campaign. He has called the shots.”

“Mark Penn,” he said, “has dominated the message in this campaign. Dominated it.”

Ickes also took umbrage at the suggestion of one Clinton campaign official that he had mismanaged the campaign’s money and deprived Clinton the resources to compete in states after February 5.

“We invested a huge amount of money in February 5 states,” said Ickes, arguing that anyone who suggested he had wasted the campaign’s money was “talking with no knowledge.”

“I don’t know what they’re basing this statement on but they have not one fact to stand on,” he said.

The chief responsibility entrusted to Ickes now is wrangling superdelegates for Clinton, or at least persuading them not to commit until after the March 4 contests in Texas and Ohio.

Here’s the case he’s been making: “Mr. Obama has just become the frontrunner. He has not been subjected to any real degree of scrutiny by the press.”

Then, he says, he tells superdelegates that “we have an obligation” to wait and pick the best candidate for the Democratic Party. “We can’t nominate a candidate who can’t withstand the withering attacks of the Republicans.”

Asked about the defection of superdelegate and civil rights icon John Lewis to Obama, Ickes said, “You never like to lose a supporter. John Lewis is a great American hero.”

But, he added, “He is one vote. He doesn’t have many votes.”

Francisco Domenech, a superdelegate supporting Hillary Clinton in Puerto Rico, thinks that Ickes, her point-man on the wrangling of superdelegates, may find himself having to explain his work on behalf of one side of the flammable issue of Puerto Rico's national status.

Domenech, who supports statehood for Puerto Rico, pointed out that the three remaining undecided superdelegates in Puerto Rico are all proponents of maintaining commonwealth status. Ickes, who became a lobbyist after working at President Bill Clinton's deputy chief of staff, was an adviser to former Governor Pedro Rossello in the battle for statehood.

"If they know of Ickes' background—they are going to question him on that," said Domenech, a Democratic National Committeeman. "And he is going to have to answer—tell them whether he is going to be advocating X or Y resolution to a problem. But the counterproposal—if they go back and let's say for argument's sake they are for commonwealth, what does that do for the statehood superdelegates? They have a tightrope to walk, because they can't upset our side."

The conventional wisdom is that Clinton will win the late-scheduled primary in Puerto Rico because she has done better than Barack Obama among Latino voters so far. (On a conference call Saturday morning, Ickes suggested that the campaign was counting on Puerto Rico to put Clinton over the top in the delegate count. "On June 7, when Puerto Rico votes," he said, "she will be neck and neck and shorty after that will wrap up the nomination.")

Domenech argued that the status issue would be very important to Puerto Rican Democratic primary voters, who he said are about evenly divided between commonwealth and statehood.

"Status is going to be the number-one issue," said Domenech, adding, "It’s going to get a lot of attention on the status issue. Here we are. We have a delegation larger than 27 states, right? We can be helpful in deciding this primary yet we are not going to be able to vote for them in the general election."

Puerto Rico has seven superdelegates altogether. For those keeping track, the three remaining undecided superdelegates are all firmly in the commonwealth category. They are Celita Arroyo de Roques, a national committeewoman, her son Eliseo Roques-Arroyo, an at-large DNC member, and Luisette Cabanas, the vice chair of the island's Democratic Party.

The pro-commonwealth governor, Anibal Acevedo Vila, is the lone superdelegate currently supporting Obama.

Kenneth McClintock, the president of Puerto Rico's Senate, and Domenech, director of the Office of Legislative Services of the Puerto Rico Legislative Assembly, are both pro-statehood. Puerto Rico's one other pro-Clinton superdelegate, Roberto Prats—the chairman of the Democratic Party of Puerto Rico—is pro-commonwealth status.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment.