WASHINGTON — Pennsylvania voters Tuesday gave Hillary Rodham Clinton every reason to continue her campaign for president.
But they did not present any definitive new evidence that would compel Democratic Party elders to step in and anoint Clinton as their White House nominee, particularly when Barack Obama continues to lead in the overall delegate count and in the popular vote.
Instead, despite a grueling and often bitter campaign, Clinton's victory Tuesday left in play the same questions that remained seven weeks ago after her 10-point victory in Ohio, another large and politically important industrial state.
What does it portend for the fall campaign that Obama is not winning working-class whites, a crucial swing voting bloc, in the Democratic primaries? Or that he has lost most of the biggest states to Clinton?
How much credit should the party elders -- the superdelegates who are expected to select the nominee by providing the final votes needed for victory -- give Obama for drawing new voters to the polls? Or for energizing younger voters and for spurring massive turnout among African Americans?
Should party leaders worry that Clinton has been all but shut out of the black vote?
The big-state primary in Pennsylvania failed to bring clarity. Now, while a muddled Democratic nominating process enters its fifth month of voting, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is building his fall campaign, embarking this week on a tour of economically disadvantaged areas that is designed to attract the same working-class voters so coveted by the Democrats.
"She can't win but won't quit," Democratic strategist Jim Jordan said of Clinton. Obama, he said, "is going to win but can't close it out. And meanwhile, McCain skates on, unmolested."
The Democrats' indecision pushes the next important test to May 6, when Indiana and North Carolina hold primaries.
Obama is expected to win in North Carolina, with its heavy concentration of black voters, college students and upper-income whites, who have formed a durable coalition for him in the primaries and caucuses.
But Indiana, a predominantly white state with industrial workers and rural voters, is a more substantial test, largely because it presents Obama with another chance to show that he can do better with those blue-collar voting groups that eluded him in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
