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WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama climbed within 200 delegates of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination based on a split decision in Tuesday's primaries.
Obama won most of the delegates at stake in the two contests, picking up at least 97 delegates in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won at least 86 delegates, with four still to be awarded.
Each state had two delegates outstanding. Results were delayed because both states have counties split into multiple congressional districts, and election workers were still assigning those votes to the proper districts on Wednesday.
Like other Democratic contests, North Carolina and Indiana awarded delegates proportionally, based on statewide results as well as votes in individual congressional districts.
In the overall race for the nomination, Obama led with 1,846.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,696.
That leaves Obama just 178.5 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
There are 217 delegates at stake in the final six contests: West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota. Obama, however, won't win enough of those delegates to claim the nomination because of the proportional method used by the Democrats to award them.
That leaves the nomination in the hands of about 265 superdelegates who have yet to be claimed. Superdelegates are the party and elected officials who will automatically attend the national convention and can support whomever they choose, regardless of what happens in the primaries and caucuses.
Nearly 800 superdelegates will attend the national convention. About 215 remain undecided and about 50 others will be named at state party conventions and meetings throughout the spring.
Obama argues that superdelegates should support the candidate who wins the most pledged delegates. Clinton says superdelegates should exercise independent judgment.
Obama is on pace to reach a majority of the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses in two weeks, when Kentucky and Oregon vote. Obama has a 163-delegate lead among pledged delegates.
Clinton leads in superdelegate endorsements, 271.5 to 259, though Obama has been chipping away at her lead since the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5. Obama picked up four superdelegates and Clinton added two Tuesday night and Wednesday.
The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions this summer.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support at the caucus doesn't change.
