Clinton Counts on Victory in Puerto Rico

Big Margin Could Bolster Her Argument

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, May 31 -- Almost five months after the Democratic campaign season officially began on a freezing Tuesday in Iowa, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) appears headed toward a last easy victory here today in a contest that has been largely overshadowed by the efforts of party officials to bring the nominating process to an orderly close.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) continued to campaign in South Dakota over the weekend and prepared for a Tuesday night campaign rally in St. Paul, Minn., where Republicans will hold their convention this summer. Democratic National Committee members met in Washington, to broker a deal over the fate of disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan.

But Clinton continued to focus on Puerto Rico in the hope that it would move her closer to securing a victory in the overall popular vote in the primary season. She spent Saturday on a presumptive victory lap around the island's capital, leading a caravan through neighborhoods on a flatbed truck blaring music.

"Campaigning in Puerto Rico is like one long Puerto Rican Day Parade," Clinton said at one stop, referring to the annual celebration in New York City. "It is incredibly energizing, exciting."

Puerto Rico will award 55 pledged delegates, not enough to put Clinton within striking distance of Obama, who made his only visit to the island last weekend. Instead, Clinton is hoping to add her share of the 500,000 or so likely voters to her popular-vote total and to assert that she is now in close enough range for uncommitted superdelegates to consider choosing her. The final two states with primaries on Tuesday have far fewer delegates at stake -- 15 in South Dakota and 16 in Montana -- and both appear to favor Obama.

The primary here has given Puerto Rico a rare role in an election process that will exclude its voters in the fall. Puerto Rico does not award electoral votes in the general election and has no representation in Congress, two sore points among an array of political concerns that local residents fear will be forgotten once the votes are counted this afternoon.

Election officials are preparing for underwhelming turnout, estimating that a quarter or fewer of the island's 2.3 million registered voters will go to the polls. That would mark a record low in a year when Democratic turnout in many states has shattered records. But there are no local candidates or initiatives on the ballot, and the battle between Clinton and Obama appears all but over.

There are forces at play urging voters not to participate, whether to emphasize the island's exclusion from general-election balloting or make the argument for a Puerto Rico independent from the U.S. government. Some advocacy groups also have complained about the primary's price tag of more than $2 million dollars, money they argue could be better spent on local needs.

Puerto Rico's two major parties -- supporters of maintaining commonwealth status, known as the reds, and statehood backers, known as the blues -- are organized around their views of the island's relationship with the United States. Neither Clinton nor Obama has picked sides in the dispute about the island's status. Both have pledged to resolve the issue during their presidencies. But underscoring the Democratic Party's lock on the electorate, Obama broke with his usual routine of building his own field operation and is instead relying on prominent red and blue supporters to turn out voters. "You can't avoid it in Puerto Rico," said one Democratic official associated with the Obama campaign.

The Obama campaign has said consistently that it expected to lose the primary here, given Clinton's popularity with Hispanic voters and the high profile she established on the island during her husband's presidency. A poll released last week by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, conducted for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Vocero and the television network Univision, found that among all Puerto Rican adults, Clinton led Obama 55 percent to 42 percent, with the remainder undecided. But among those who said they were certain to vote, Clinton's lead expanded to 59 percent, compared with 40 percent for Obama.