With the spate of new polling out of Pennsylvania released today and yesterday, both the Pollster.com trend estimate and the Real Clear Politics average now show Hillary Clinton leading Barack Obama, by 7.0 points and 8.6 points, respectively. Assuming for a moment that this lead doesn't budge too much in either direction and Clinton is able to carry the Keystone state a week from now, what will be the overall effect on the state of the race for 2,024 delegates? CQ's Greg Giroux and Jonathan Allen say not much.

How many delegates might each candidate win in Pennsylvania, which is the most populous of the states and territories that have yet to vote?

That answer will be mainly determined not by the sum of the votes Clinton and Obama win in Pennsylvania, but rather by the state's parts. Pennsylvania will send 187 Democratic delegates to the party's national convention in Denver this August, and most of them -- 103 to be exact -- will be allocated according to the votes the candidates receive in each of the state's 19 congressional districts.

And a CQ Politics analysis of the political circumstances in Pennsylvania's congressional districts, detailed below, projects an edge to Clinton -- but by just 53 district-level delegates to 50 for Obama under the Democratic Party's proportional distribution rules.

These numbers suggest that Clinton, even with a victory in Pennsylvania, would make only a small incremental gain against Obama's overall lead in the delegate race.

Of the state's remaining 84 slots, only 55 pledged delegates will be distributed based on the statewide popular vote, with the state's remaining 29 seats going to unpledged "superdelegates."

You can click through the link above to get a district-by-district breakdown, but the long and the short of it is that one can generally estimate how many delegates each candidate will receive in most congressional districts due to proportional allocation, the number of delegates in each district, and general demographics. For instance, in districts that have five delegates, a 70 percent supermajority is required for the winner to take home a 4-to-1 delegate win rather than a 3-to-2 delegate win. The breakdowns in other districts are similar.

This isn't an exact science, it's estimation. What's more, as mentioned in the article above, about a third of the state's pledged delegates are apportioned in relation to the statewide, rather than district-by-district, vote. So Clinton might be able to score some extra delegates on that end, bumping up her net gain from three to significantly more than that. However, with a 164 pledged delegate deficit and an overall 136 delegate deficit, merely netting 10 or even 20 or 30 delegates out of Pennsylvania -- particularly when North Carolina is beginning to look like a rout in favor of Obama (and thus another big delegate pick up) -- is just not going to be enough to get Clinton much closer to earning the nomination.

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