Throughout the primary season, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been in a virtual tie, in both polls and votes cast. She trails him by less than 2 percent of all delegates. She appears to lead him in ballots cast, if you count the Michigan and Florida primaries, which were not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee and therefore don't count in the delegate tallies but still represent actual voters' preferences and therefore do count in gauging the overall popular preference. Preliminary efforts to extrapolate from voting returns and exit polls suggest that overall she has probably won a majority of registered Democrats' votes, since Obama has drawn heavily from independents. And key Democratic blocs including Hispanics, Jews, women, gays, seniors, and the white working class have all preferred her to him.
Primaries have had a major influence on nominations since only 1952, and in that period the top two rivals have reconciled on a dream ticket just twice, when John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in 1960 and when Ronald Reagan brought George Bush onboard in 1980. That rarity doesn't bode well for the creation of an Obama-Clinton ticket. It does, however, augur well for victory for an Obama-Clinton ticket. For both the Kennedy-Johnson and Reagan-Bush fusions offer models of how a divided party can turn debilitating rifts into assets.
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