Say you’re a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, and you’ve just lost two races — not big ones, but legitimate contests nonetheless — to an opponent who leads you in the popular vote, the number of delegates awarded and the number of states won. What do you do? Why, you declare that your opponent is in a dangerous tailspin from which there might be no recovery.

“If Barack Obama cannot reverse his downward spiral with a big win in Pennsylvania,” the Clinton campaign wrote in a e-mail to reporters this week after Obama’s victories in Mississippi and Wyoming, “he cannot possibly be competitive against John McCain in November.”

Now that’s the audacity of hope. But the weird thing is, Team Clinton might have a point.

Obama has won caucuses and primaries all across the country. But the big ones — not so much.

“Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar,” the Clinton campaign wrote, “and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far — every state except his home state of Illinois.”

The problem for Obama is that we’re not just talking about California and New York — states that he would surely win if he were the Democratic nominee.

There is Ohio. And Florida, where — question it if you will — Clinton and Obama were on the ballot, Democratic voters knew what the contest was, and Clinton won decisively. Then there’s Michigan, where — well, who knows what will happen.

And next month, Pennsylvania. “The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. goes through Pennsylvania,” wrote the Clinton campaign. That’s spin, but it’s also true.

Shortly after the Clinton campaign sent out its “downward spiral” memo, Obama spokesman Bill Burton hit back with a nicely sarcastic response.

How to win in November? “I suppose by holding obviously Democratic states like California and New York,” Burton wrote, “and beating McCain in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin, where Clinton lost to Obama by mostly crushing margins.”

One way you don’t win, Team Obama continued, is making the race about just one state. “We do not view this as a race solely about the state of Pennsylvania,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters Wednesday. “They have a big lead … They are the prohibitive favorite. They should win by a healthy margin.”

But as much as the Obama campaign scoffs, Clinton just doesn’t seem to be out of it. Yes, she is behind in delegates, but the system of awarding those delegates makes no sense. Clinton won Texas, but Obama got more delegates. Obama gained more net delegates by winning Mississippi and Wyoming than Clinton did by winning Texas and Ohio. You tell me how that’s right.

Meanwhile, the latest measures show the race essentially tied. One-to-one match-ups in a new Wall Street Journal poll show Obama beating McCain, 47 percent to 44, and Clinton beating McCain, 47 percent to 45.

When you’re trying to measure which Democrat would fare better against the Republican nominee, you can’t get much closer than that.

This week the Clinton campaign claimed that, “In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has lost ground among men, women, Democrats, independents and Republicans — all of which point to a candidacy past its prime.”

A candidacy past its prime? Burton responded incredulously: “These guys kill me.”

Who knows? Maybe they will.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it