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 To hear them tell it, steely determination, delegate math, mounting debt, party unity, personal legacy and more could factor.
"I'm staying in this race until there's a nominee," the former front-runner told reporters not long ago, and on the rope lines at her campaign events, women supporters implore her not to give up her pioneering candidacy despite the lengthening odds.
Yet on Monday, she e-mailed a thank-you video to supporters that cast her campaign in terms far bigger than her own candidacy, and seemed to hint at other plans.
"Thank you for caring so much about our country. And now it's on to West Virginia and Kentucky and Oregon and we'll stay in touch," she said. A valedictory or not, it made no mention of later primaries in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana.
Could the vice presidential nomination be on her mind?
One top aide, Howard Wolfson, said Sunday he had seen "no evidence of her interest" in joining Obama's ticket.
Nor have she and her associates been entirely clear about her insistence that delegations from Michigan and Florida be seated.
"It is not enough to simply seat their representatives at the convention in Denver," she wrote Obama last week, urging that delegates be allocated in accordance with the popular vote in primaries held in violation of party rules.
Yet on Sunday, Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman, suggested that half the delegates from each state be seated.
That would resolve the controversy and allow Clinton to claim credit for seeing the issue through, although not to the point of jeopardizing Obama's growing delegate lead.
The Illinois senator has 1,871.5 delegates in The Associated Press count, compared with 1,697 for Clinton, with 2,025 needed for the nomination. He picked up four superdelegates during the day, while her total remain unchanged, and some of her supporters have even begun to switch sides.
Money may matter, too, although arcane federal campaign finance rules appear to make it easier to pare her debts than is generally understood.
Several experienced campaign finance lawyers argue that Clinton can have her Senate campaign fund assume all debts owed to others. Then, with permission from her donors, she could transfer into the same account an estimated $22 million she has raised for the general election campaign.
That money could be used to pay down what she owes others, they said, but not the $11.4 million or more she loaned herself.
None of this has been discussed in public. And Clinton, who has not shown any inclination to give up the race, has yet to even broach the subject of seeking help from Obama in retiring her debt.
But he seemed eager to discuss it over the weekend.
"Obviously I'd want to have a broad-ranging discussion with Senator Clinton about how I could make her feel good about the process and have her on the team moving forward," he said.
Then there are the imponderables, according to those who have been inside campaigns.
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 "It just takes time for the candidate to realize it's over, for the campaign to realize it's over and for everyone to deal with that in some sort of responsible way," said Bill Carrick, a California-based strategist who has worked on winning as well as losing presidential campaigns.
"From my point of view, there's very little benefit for sticking it out. You just run up more and more debts and you become increasingly irrelevant to the process."
On the other hand, he said that by dropping out, Clinton "looks magnanimous. She can unify the party faster. A lot of people would be relieved, particularly the unpledged superdelegates that they didn't have to make a choice in a competitive environment."
But Tad Devine, another Democrat with long experience in presidential campaigns, sees it somewhat differently.
"If she had gotten out over the weekend, she still would have won the West Virginia primary. Obama would have been beaten by a candidate most likely who had gotten out of the race," he said.
Clinton does Obama no harm, he added, if she competes in the remaining primaries "so long as she continues her effort for making her own case and making the case against Senator McCain and not in any fundamental or meaningful or important way diminishing Senator Obama or questioning his capacity to be president."
Carrick said he doubted the Clintons were weighing anything else other than whether she could win.
"I would be very very skeptical that there be any consideration about the impact of 2012. I don't think people look too far ahead in politics."
Others argue that Clinton is not so much seeking an exit, as a miracle.
"They're hoping that something dramatic and unexpected will change the race," said Steve McMahon, who worked in Howard Dean's campaign in 2004 and has been neutral in the current campaign.
"But hope is generally better as a campaign message than as a campaign strategy."
While others speculate, Clinton seems to delight in the mystery.
On Mother's Day, in West Virginia, she said she had received steady encouragement from supporters, including a letter that ended this way:
"It's not over until the lady in the pantsuit says it is."
[Associated
Press; By DAVID ESPO and LIZ SIDOTI]
David Espo and Liz Sidoti cover the presidential campaign for The Associated Press. Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this story.
Copyright 2008 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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