Three months after closing her presidential campaign, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton remains a major factor in the race. The big question is how many of her supporters in the Democratic primaries will transfer their enthusiasm or at least their votes to the party's nominee, Sen. Barack Obama - especially now that Sen. John McCain is running with a woman, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, as No. 2 on the Republican ticket.

Pollster William Arnone, a former Clinton adviser, has found that many of the New York senator's backers are still at risk of defecting to McCain. He surveyed 328 of Clinton's "most fervent" supporters during the week of the GOP convention in St. Paul and found that 77 percent planned to vote for Obama, 11 percent back McCain, and the rest are either undecided or plan to stay home.

Last week, reporters following Clinton on the trail noted how little she criticized Palin, and one group of active Clinton backers even issued a press release defending Palin, saying she had been the victim of media smears because she is a woman.

"The very notion that Sarah Palin should not have accepted this nomination because she is a mother with demanding challenges underscores just how far we have to go," said leaders of the group, called the WomenCount PAC, which was formed in May to rebut calls for Clinton to get out of the race.

Among those the group cited for smearing Palin were liberal radio host Ed Schultz, Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn and CNN correspondent John Roberts.

WomenCount founder Rosemary Camposano, a former Silicon Valley public relations executive, says the PAC isn't planning to campaign for Obama and doesn't even plan to endorse a candidate for president because of the "emotional" nature of the Democratic nominating campaign for many women.

"Our membership is very skewed in how they are going to go," Camposano says. "By far most will remain loyal to the Democratic Party, but a lot of women feel the Democrats abandoned women and women's issues. They are mad enough to abstain, write in Hillary Clinton or vote for McCain."

The group includes a number of female business executives, including Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the clothing label Esprit; Stacy Mason, a former Washington, D.C., newspaper editor and publisher; and Amy Rao, founder of the tech firm Integrated Archive Systems. And it is supporting a number of Democratic women running for Congress, among them Jeanne Shaheen, the former New Hampshire governor trying to unseat Republican Sen. John E. Sununu.

Camposano says WomenCount's biggest campaign this fall will be titled "Stop the Silence on Sexism." She won't talk about details, but the group is still hopping mad at Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, and at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not doing more to defend Clinton from what Camposano calls "outright bashing." Both party leaders, she said, were "incredibly disloyal."

Meanwhile, another group of Clinton backers, calling themselves Democrats For Principle Before Party, has already bought space for a print ad in the battleground state of Michigan aimed at undermining Obama, and is pledging more to come. "Can the country trust a presidential candidate who is the product of a corrupt process?" asks the ad, which ran in the Lansing State Journal.

Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University Law School professor who co-founded the group, ran ads in major Washington publications, including CQ Today, in advance of the Democrats' Denver convention to pressure party leaders to give Clinton a vote at the convention. Ultimately party leaders acquiesced, but Feldman says Dean and the Obama campaign intimidated Clinton delegates and pressured the New York senator to release her supporters from their obligation to vote for her. The vote was short-circuited when Clinton called for Obama's nomination by acclamation.

Feldman says she is now rallying support to have Clinton elevated to Senate majority leader next year, in place of Harry Reid of Nevada, and to have Dean removed as chairman of the DNC. All the energy the group put into winning Clinton a convention vote "is now going to be channeled into making sure the Democratic Party does not inherit such incompetent leadership as we have had to endure this election season," she says.