Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign acknowledged this morning that even if all delegates from Michigan and Florida were seated at the Democratic convention, she would not have enough delegates to claim the presidential nomination.

This suggests that the campaign has determined that one of the major avenues to the nomination is almost certainly closed off and that if Mrs. Clinton intends to pursue it, she will have to look elsewhere — most likely to an appeal to the superdelegates to give the nomination to Mrs. Clinton.

Still, asked on a conference call with reporters to clarify whether they had concluded that the Florida and Michigan delegations were irrelevant at this point, campaign officials stopped short of agreeing.

“That’s why we have a process, to find out,” said Geoff Garin, the campaign’s top strategist. “All we’re saying is, we ought to let the process play through. We think that it continues to be constructive for the Democratic Party to do that, as we go into these next set of states.”



Phil Singer, a spokesman for the campaign, added that if it were clear that seating the delegations in full would not threaten Senator Barack Obama’s path to the nomination, the Obama campaign would be enthusiastically supporting their seating.

The rules committee plans to meet May 31 to resolve the issues with Michigan and Florida, both of which violated D.N.C. rules in holding their primaries earlier than the party allowed.

The Clinton campaign has argued for months that not seating delegates from those states would disenfranchise voters in those states and put the party at risk for losing them in the fall.

Earlier in the call, Clinton officials were asked to lay out the math by which seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida would get Mrs. Clinton significantly closer to the nomination. The reporter asking the question, from the Detroit News, said that it appeared, based on estimates of pledged delegates, that even if those delegations were fully counted, “it’s likely you’ll come up behind.”

Mr. Singer said that even if the delegates were counted, the campaign would still be about 100 delegates shy of the number needed. The implication was that the gap could not be made up, even if she wins more delegates in the remaining contests, as she is expected to do. He also said he expected the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida to ensure that all voters are represented.

Asked again if it was correct that the Clinton campaign would still not reach the full number of delegates, Mr. Singer said, “That is correct.”

The Clinton camp has also been arguing that the full number of delegates needed to claim the nomination is 2,209, which includes Florida and Michigan, as opposed to 2,025. Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said that the 2,025 was “not the operative number.”