WASHINGTON, 24 April 2008 — 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 Hillary 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, Hillary’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 Hillary?

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 Hillary 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 Hillary. 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.

While Hillary celebrated her win Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Obama demonstrated his immediate focus on Indiana by traveling there and delivering his speech from Evansville. A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll showed him holding a slight lead there.

“It would be symbolic if Sen. Obama won a state like Indiana,” said the state’s Democratic chairman, Dan Parker, a Hillary supporter.

But an Obama loss in Indiana might give Hillary an air of momentum, particularly because it is a state where many Democrats have known Obama for several years because of shared media markets with his home state of Illinois.

Later primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, which play to Hillary ‘s demographic strengths, might give superdelegates even more reason to reassess Obama’s electability.

Until voters in those states weigh in, Obama is likely to point to favorable evidence from the Pennsylvania results in seeking new endorsements from superdelegates.

Obama outspent Hillary on television and radio ads in Pennsylvania by more than two to one, yet he did not make major gains among working-class white voters. But he didn’t lose support among that group, either — even after navigating some of the worst weeks of the campaign so far, including a crisis over racially charged comments by his former pastor and accusations that his own comments about economically “bitter” small-town voters showed him to be elitist.

Media exit polls showed Obama winning 38 percent of the white vote in Pennsylvania, nearly unchanged from the 34 percent he won in Ohio seven weeks ago.

Even though he lost Pennsylvania by a substantial margin, Obama may argue that he was able to improve his standing with important parts of the electorate. Exit polls found that he won 37 percent of voters over age 65, up from 26 percent in Ohio.