Clinton campaign strategist Geoff Garin and communications director Howard Wolfson, speaking to a breakfast meeting with reporters, shot down speculation that Clinton would drop out of the race after her expected defeat of Obama in West Virginia.
''We do not believe there will be a nominee chosen unless or until someone reaches 2,209 [delegates], which is the number including Florida and Michigan,'' Wolfson said. ``If that happens by June 3, someone will be the nominee. If that hasn't, then the nomination fight continues.''
The campaign's position comes as Obama's support among superdelegates -- party officials and insiders who can vote however they choose -- rises. Obama's aides said Friday that he would picked up the support of eight new superdelegates, including one who had supported Clinton. He appears to have wiped out her superdelegate lead, according to some estimates.
Clinton also is lagging in the pledged delegate count and is short on campaign cash. Still, her advisors laid out a strategy in which her path to the nomination depends on wooing working-class, rural whites and senior citizens and pushing for the seating of delegates from Michigan and Florida. Those delegates were banned after their states defied party rules and moved up their primaries.
''Sen. Clinton does far better with blue-collar voters, working-class voters in general,'' Garin said. ``Historically, those have been the key swing voters in the general elections, and we believe that the evidence is clear that Sen. Clinton is the better candidate to win those votes for the Democratic Party in November.''
Clinton was more direct about her approach in an interview Thursday with USA Today.
''I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,'' she told the paper.
Clinton then referred to an Associated Press article, saying it ``found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening, and how whites in [North Carolina and Indiana] who had not completed college were supporting me.''
At Friday's breakfast meeting, Garin and Wolfson suggested that Clinton's appeal to so-called ''downscale Democrats'' would give her longer coattails for congressional Democrats to ride on than Obama would.
They presented handouts that suggested that 20 freshman Democrats in Republican-leaning districts would have a better shot at reelection if Clinton were the nominee because she won 16 of the 20 districts during the primaries.
''We believe the evidence is that Sen. Clinton can do more to help Democrats win a bigger majority in 2008,'' Garin said.
Clinton's brain trust continued to try to raise doubts about Obama's electability in the general election, pointing out that Clinton won big swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida.
But not everyone was buying the Clinton campaign's logic. Clinton suffered a major defection Friday when superdelegate Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama.
