The departure of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards added one more variable to the 22-part equation that the Democratic presidential candidates will attempt to solve between now and next Tuesday.

That puzzle, unprecedented in presidential politics, calls on their campaigns to apportion resources among states, media markets and congressional districts in a transcontinental competition, in which 22 states are hosting primaries or caucuses.

Throughout the campaign, national polls and most state polls suggest an overall advantage for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who won Florida's beauty-contest primary Tuesday. But Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the rival she will meet in a debate tonight in Los Angeles, approaches the Feb. 5 contests with the momentum of his South Carolina primary triumph and this week's high-profile endorsements from the daughter and brother of the late President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Edwards was a distant third in the overall race, and his support in individual states hovered in the low double digits in most state polls. But that store of voters is more than enough to tip the margin in a race in which the two leaders have split the state victories so far.

That reality was reflected on the Clinton and Obama web sites, both of which were quickly edited yesterday to feature splashy tributes to the former senator and, now, former candidate.

Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling and research said the likely beneficiary of Mr. Edwards' orphaned supporters, "probably depends on what part of the country you're talking about.

"In the South, he had a lot of blue-collar whites, and I think they'll go to Clinton," Mr. Coker said. "In other parts of the country, maybe Obama."

Analysts said two questions would be crucial in determining the net effect of the shift from a three- to a two-person competition. Mr. Obama won a plurality of white voters in Iowa and ran close to Mrs. Clinton among whites voters in New Hampshire, the site of her first upset victory. In South Carolina and Florida, however, he received a significantly lower share of the white vote after a campaign in which former President Bill Clinton was criticized for comparing the Illinois senator's candidacy with those in 1984 and 1988 of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist.

If those southern states, rather than Iowa and new Hampshire, were to set a demographic pattern for Tuesday and beyond, Mrs. Clinton would have a clear advantage. But another frequent political dynamic could spell trouble for the New York senator. Mrs. Clinton entered the race with far better name recognition than any of her rivals -- with the most support, but also the highest negative ratings among the Democratic candidates. Mr. Obama cited that high and controversial profile as he argued in a speech in Denver yesterday that she is too polarizing to be elected.

If the logic of his analysis is correct, most voters have already made up their minds regarding Mrs. Clinton. If you aren't already for her, you're not likely to change. According to that school of thought, Edwards voters are more likely to gravitate to another alternative to the candidate who started as the clear front-runner.

Most recent polls in the states poised to vote Tuesday suggest that, while her campaign may have lost a claim to inevitability, she still is the front-runner. In a compilation of surveys from 12 of the larger states being contested next week, Mrs. Clinton had clear leads in eight, including Arizona, New Jersey, Missouri, her New York home and California, the day's biggest prize. Mr. Obama led in only three of the 12, according to Pollster.com. In addition to his Illinois base, he had narrow leads in Georgia and Colorado, while the two campaigns were virtually even in Connecticut.

At least one major national survey, however, showed steady movement toward Mr. Obama. The Gallup Poll's daily tracking survey yesterday showed Mrs. Clinton with a six-point advantage over Mr. Obama, 42 percent to 36 percent. Just a week ago -- the day after Mr. Obama's South Carolina triumph -- her national lead, according to Gallup, had been 20 points. It's not yet clear whether that presages similar erosion in her early advantages in most of the states voting Tuesday.

But as both campaigns have pointed out, neither poll numbers nor the eventual popular vote in those states will tell the most important story that will emerge next week. Earlier in the campaign, the overall state winner was the most-watched indicator in the race. Now, the campaigns have turned their focus to the battle for individual delegates.

That's a competition in which it will be difficult for either candidate to overwhelm the other, because of the Democrats' complex delegate-selection rules. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats do not have any winner-take-all contests such as Tuesday's Florida GOP race, in which Arizona Sen. John McCain, with a narrow popular-vote margin, was able to claim all of the states' delegates.

While the Democratic procedures are not uniform from state to state, they all embody some form of proportional representation, whereby delegates are divided among the candidates -- typically based on some combination of statewide and congressional district results. In a congressional district with four delegates at stake, for example, one candidate could win in a relative landslide --say, 55 percent to 45 percent -- but, after rounding, each candidate would end up with two delegates.

"This is a search for delegates," Clinton senior strategist Mark Penn said yesterday. "It's set up to be extremely competitive. ... The search for delegates is going to continue straight through to the convention."

One likely advantage for Mrs. Clinton next week stems from the relatively large proportions of Latino voters in several of the bigger states. More than one-fifth of California's voters are Hispanic, while Arizona and Colorado also have significant Hispanic populations. In Nevada, polls of caucus voters showed that Mrs. Clinton won the Latino vote overwhelmingly.

Seeking inroads in that advantage, the Obama campaign has taken pains to showcase a series of Hispanic endorsements. "Support from Latino officials has really taken off," said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama's campaign manager. The campaign is also dispatching its new supporter, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, from a political family popular with the Hispanic community, to campaign today and tomorrow in New Mexico and California.

Another important group in which the Kennedy imprimatur could pay dividends for Mr. Obama is with older voters, who have been a relative strength for Mrs. Clinton in previous races.

The two remaining Democratic candidates will meet face-to-face tonight for the first time since they emerged as the last survivors of their party's nomination battle. The last time they met, in Myrtle Beach, S.C., they joined to stage the roughest, most personal debate of the long campaign season.

In a conference calls with reporters yesterday, Clinton advisers refused to be drawn out about whether viewers should expect more sharp elbows tonight. But they did take the occasion to blast Mr. Obama for the tone of his Denver speech yesterday, which Clinton spokesman Phil Singer derided as "the greatest hits of negative attacks."

"It is time for new leadership that understands the way to win a debate with John McCain, or any Republican who is nominated, is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq," Mr. Obama told his Colorado audience.

Mr. Singer dismissed that attack. "Sen. Obama doesn't sound like he's ready to practice the new politics he so often talks about. In fact, Senator Obama's remarks suggest that his talk about bringing the country together is just that -- talk," the Clinton spokesman said.