As this is being written, voters in Indiana and North Carolina are casting ballots in their states’ Democratic presidential primaries. Everybody agrees that the two primaries are crucial for both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, and just about everybody also agrees that their outcome won’t decide the race for good and all.

It is all but statistically impossible for either candidate to win enough candidates in Indiana and North Carolina to achieve the 2,025 delegates needed to wrap up the nomination. (Obama had 1,745 as of Monday, according to The Associated Press; Clinton had 1,608. There were 187 delegates up for grabs in the two primaries — 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana.)

Here, without foreknowledge of the outcomes in Indiana or North Carolina, is the conventional wisdom on every possible outcome.

• Obama wins both primaries — A near-death blow to Clinton, and one that might convince even her closest supporters that she should drop out of the race. But the odds of it happening are astronomical, and even if it does, Clinton is likely to stay in despite the advice of her war council and the entreaties of the Democratic Party establishment. She will probably fight on; that’s what Clintons do.

• Clinton wins both — Another long, long shot, but not impossible. Twin victories would give Clinton tremendous momentum going into the last string of primaries and give her a strong argument with which to woo the all-important superdelegates (more about them later).

• They split — This is what everyone expects: Obama takes most of the North Carolina delegates; Clinton wins Indiana. If this happens, the Democratic Party simply paves more track and the grueling race continues. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, will continue to kick back and let the two Democrats tear each other apart.

If the remaining primaries prove inconclusive — and they probably will — the nomination will depend upon the party’s superdelegates, and, to a lesser extent, on how the party ends up dealing with the party delegations from Florida and Michigan, which broke the rules by holding early primaries and were summarily banned from participation in the national convention.

Not surprisingly, Obama and Clinton have been split on those issues. Clinton, who won in Michigan and Florida, wants those delegates seated. She’s not apt to get that, and shouldn’t. The two states broke the rules and should have to pay at least some penalty. We wouldn’t oppose a compromise to give the states at least some voice at the convention, but they shouldn’t get off scot-free, either.

When Obama held a larger lead in regular delegates, he was insisting that the party’s superdelegates be forced to vote with the majority of the regular delegates. That seemed to us to fly in the face of the very reason for having superdelegates — to provide a last-ditch check on the power of an unwise majority. One might reasonably object to the very idea of such superdelegates, but the fact remains that the Democrats chose to have them, and they shouldn’t be made irrelevant.

As Obama has gained the pledges of more superdelegates (he now has 252 to Clinton’s 266, according to a CNN count), he has muted his call to bind the “super” votes to the convention majority, but he’d probably still like for it to happen.

For the superdelegates are apt to be the deciding factor in choosing the Democratic nominee, and a lot of them are still keeping their cards close to their vests.

And to think, we posited in this very space only a few months ago that national party conventions might well be on their way out because nothing of consequence ever happened at them any more.

From the looks of things now, we were very mistaken.