For those who keep asking Hillary Rodham Clinton why she doesn’t just drop out of the Democratic presidential primary race, the senator from New York has a new answer: Let’s wait until a key meeting of party officials on May 31.

That’s the day the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee will decide the fate of contested delegates from Florida and Michigan. Party leaders in both states violated DNC rules by scheduling their primaries before Feb. 5, putting their convention delegates at risk.

Now, the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which is made up of 30 DNC members, must decide whether to seat all, none or some of those delegates. The latter option seems the most likely, given DNC chairman Howard Dean’s pledge that Democrats will somehow find a way to seat those delegates at their national convention in August.

The pending panel meeting isn’t Clinton’s only excuse for staying in the race. She has also cited her determination to stick it out through the last of the Democratic primaries on June 3, notwithstanding Barack Obama’s apparently insurmountable delegate lead.

Increasingly, though, Clinton has harped on the May 31 meeting as an important threshold. She and her campaign aides have ratcheted up their lobbying campaign to include delegates from Florida and Michigan in the overall delegate count.

But it’s hard to see how that meeting will substantially change the math for Clinton. Although Florida Democrats argue that all the delegates from their state should be seated outright, it’s not likely that DNC officials will suddenly find a reason to reverse their earlier stance that Florida broke the rules and must pay a price.

Both Obama and Clinton had agreed not to stump in Florida or in any other state that violated party rules. The best that Clinton might hope for is that the Rules panel embraces an idea first floated by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who backs her, to seat all the Florida delegates but give each of them only half a vote.

A similar compromise appears likely in the case of Michigan, where Clinton won the primary but Obama was not even on the ballot. There, state party officials have endorsed a plan drafted by a four-member task force of uncommitted superdelegates that included Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. Levin and his fellow task force members proposed allocating 69 of Michigan’s 128 elected delegates to Clinton, and 59 to Obama. This splits the difference between the 73-55 allocation supported by Clinton and the 50-50 division backed by Obama.

Nobody can predict, of course, how the Rules committee members will vote. And the wild card in the final count remains the superdelegates -- those 800 party officials and elected officials with automatic convention seats. On the heels of her sweeping West Virginia primary win on May 13, Clinton redoubled her efforts to convince both superdelegates and Rules committee Democrats that she’s best positioned to win key swing states in a general election.

“She’s trying to score psychologically,” said Robert Rupp, a history and political science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Given the risk that the dispute poses to Democrats, he added, it will be “to Obama’s advantage to be generous.”

“I don’t think the Obama campaign wants to be perceived as standing in the way of a negotiated settlement,” concurred William A. Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. As he sees it, the Rules panel has three jobs: to minimize the controversy’s impact on Election Day; to bring the party together; and to frame the outcome as fair to all parties.

Whatever happens on May 31, and even on Election Day, Democrats are already gearing up to rewrite their primary rules. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced various bills that would revamp the primary schedule. Some have proposed rotating primaries; others favor holding concurrent primaries, spread out over a four-month period, in different regions. The current system of allocating delegates proportionally, and of automatically seating superdelegates, may also get a second look.

“I think everyone admits that this process did not work well logistically,” Rupp said.

No one agrees more than the Florida and Michigan Democrats whose delegates are now in limbo.

“We certainly have proven the point that this is an issue that must be dealt with before the next election,” said Michigan Democratic Party spokeswoman Liz Kerr. “This was a principled fight for us. We certainly do not want another state to have to go through this in four years.”

In the meantime, for all Clinton’s emphasis on May 31, the Rules panel won’t decide the primary. By now, most analysts agree that Obama can afford to be magnanimous. That’s in part because superdelegates keep drifting his way. As Galston put it, “My sense is that his edge in delegates is substantial enough so that a resolution that gave her an edge of up to ten delegates in Michigan and up to 15 in Florida would probably not risk changing the overall results.”