Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with her daughter, Chelsea, attend a mother-daughter dinner yesterday in Washington. Clinton is holding her niece, Fiona.

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NYT / STEPHEN CROWLEY

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will soldier on, Sen. Barack Obama will almost certainly defeat her, and soon enough the Democratic presidential rivals will find grounds for reconciliation.

So runs one emerging line of hopeful partisan forecasting in the wake of a split verdict Tuesday — North Carolina for Obama, handily; Indiana for Clinton, barely — that gave most of the advantage to the front-runner, Obama.

Tuesday was “a decisive day in the nominating process,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine. “It’s clear now that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.”

Even as Clinton reiterated her intent to stay in the race until a nominee is chosen, Devine said “the only question now is how is this going to end? What is the choreography of the nomination?” Devine, a Providence native who helped write the nominating rules that make it hard for two well-matched candidates to break away from one another, voiced a widely held view among party insiders.

There has been much speculation that the long, sometimes harsh fight between Clinton, of New York, and Obama, of Illinois, would damage the eventual nominee’s chances of beating the Republican candidate, Arizona Sen. John McCain, in the fall.

But Democratic leaders in Indiana in both camps downplayed that fear over the weekend and other prominent Democrats yesterday said Clinton can play out her string — starting on what should be favorable ground in next Tuesday’s West Virginia primary — without damaging the party.

“Senator Clinton’s staying in the race is not necessarily a bad thing,” provided she does so “positively,” Devine said.

Sen. Jack Reed is an uncommitted party leader — a superdelegate — who remains unwilling to prod Clinton to quit the race. “I think we’ve come far enough down the line that we should probably go the course, at least to see how these primaries work out,” Reed said.

The senator added that he sees a “growing consensus” that “a logical time to begin to conclude is at the end of the primary season.”

As for Tuesday’s results, Reed said the race “has featured constantly shifting momentum. It appears that Senator Clinton had built some momentum. Now that seems to be shifting. That is one of the key factors we have to assess: Who has the momentum going into the general election? That has been unresolved” based on Tuesday.

Reed said he has not "put an internal deadline” on endorsing a Democrat for president, “but the reality is we can’t go much past the middle of June.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island’s most prominent Clinton supporter and another superdelegate, said he hopes she continues running, despite trailing in the race for delegates. “She’s entitled to fight on and I think she has a good message and I think the process is a good one.”

Tuesday’s results have widened Obama’s lead in elected delegates to the party’s summer convention and nudged superdelegates to come out in support of the Illinois senator. Those factors combine to make him “unbeatable,” Devine said early yesterday, predicting that Obama will soon outstrip Clinton in support from superdelegates, the party leaders who hold the balance of nominating power.

Indeed, four more superdelegates fell into Obama’s column by the end of the day.

The total needed to win a nominating majority is 2,025 delegates. Obama has now won just under 1,600 in all the caucus and primary states so far, with Clinton about 170 delegates behind. Neither total includes the superdelegates who have already announced their preference. There remain but 217 delegates to be chosen in the six remaining contests between now and June 3, so neither candidate can win the nomination without support from the other big store of convention votes: the 265 superdelegates who remain undecided.

The only other potential source of nominating strength — the delegations of Michigan and Florida — is in limbo because the parties in those two states broke national Democratic rules by pushing their primaries up too early in the year. Devine sees the impasse over how to honor the intentions of voters in those two crucial states as a potential ground for compromise between Obama and Clinton.

“These two campaigns have to start talking to one another,” he said. “They need to figure out between the two campaigns how they can accommodate one other.” A deal to seat the contested Michigan and Florida delegates would be one way, he said. And an ideal time to unveil such a deal, he said, would be May 31 at a Democratic convention rules committee meeting that some have dreaded as a potentially nasty showdown.

“If they can resolve those problems they resolve a very delicate political problem in two very important states for the general election,” Devine said.

Then with Clinton’s help — “maybe even with her on the ticket,” Devine said — Obama could set about the business of shoring up the weaknesses among blue collar voters and other blocs that have appeared over the course of the nominating struggle.The math

It takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

As of yesterday, according to the Associated Press, Sen. Barack Obama has 1,846.5 delegates to 1,696 for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Those totals include superdelegates who have already announced their preferences.

About 265 superdelegates have yet to indicate which candidate they favor.

There are 217 delegates at stake in the six remaining primary contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Oregon, South Dakota and Montana.

The Democratic National Convention opens in Denver on Aug. 25.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com