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On Wednesday, a day after talk show hosts, press pundits and heavyweight political operatives pronounced her game over (Stick a fork in her, she's done, said the New York Post), the 60- year-old senator defiantly said: 'I'm still in.'
There was no hint of fatigue, no dark eye-circles, after Tuesday's crushing defeat in North Carolina and wafer-thin victory in Indiana.
Instead, she launched straight into the Democratic Party's next nominating contest in West Virginia.
'I'm staying in this race until there is a nominee, and obviously I'm going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee,' she said.
Her strength is apparent - at least to herself - she gets the swing voters in the swing states which front runner Barack Obama has failed to win over, such as the Hispanic and white, working-class voters, especially women.
In her opinion, that makes her the candidate of choice against Republican candidate John McCain.
'We should stay focused on nominating the stronger candidate against Senator McCain,' she said. Referring, of course, to herself.
Clinton aides concede there is little hope of erasing Mr Obama's lead in delegates - not in the six primary contests still remaining, and not even if she wins her bid to include the disbarred Florida and Michigan primaries.
So she was found on Wednesday foraging for support in the next battlefield - Capitol Hill.
After party elder and former Clinton-backer George McGovern switched sides on Wednesday, she is having little apparent success with the superdelegates who could still sway the race.
New York Senator Charles Schumer, an early Clinton backer, offered scant encouragement when asked whether Mrs Clinton should quit, saying only: 'It's her decision to make.'
Fellow supporter, Senator Dianne Feinstein, was less than committal, too, saying: 'I think we're at a point where I would like to know... how it becomes do-able.'
Reports say her inner circle is resigned to her loss, with only a few asking her to hang on until the party's August convention in Denver.
Among the few is her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who has been saying: 'We are not big on quitters in this family.'
Mr Obama, meanwhile, took a day off campaigning, making calls to win over superdelegates. His supporters are said to be already talking about his acceptance speech.
Puzzling over Mrs Clinton's decision to go on in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, analysts have come up with a variety of plausible reasons:
One, she wants to be the last candidate standing in the event of a surprise development so damaging that superdelegates would decide Mr Obama is not electable .
Two, she's gunning for the vice-president's post. Her biographer Carl Bernstein subscribes to this theory, saying she will stay on until she is in a position to force Mr Obama to accept her as his running mate.
Three, she needs to pay off her campaign debt - having sunk more than US$11 million (S$15 million) of her and her husband's own money into the campaign, if she quits now she will have no chance of it being replaced by supporters' donations.
Four, she's in it for her supporters' sake. 'She's made a commitment to let the people in the remaining states have their chance to express their voice,' says her top campaign strategist Geoff Garin.
Five, and most complex of all, are her personal motivations: to make history, to satisfy a personal conviction she can somehow still win.
Analysts say that is one of her personality traits, pointing to how she hung on to her failed health-care reform efforts during her husband's presidency, long after it was clear they were doomed.
Or, as she put it in a letter to supporters e-mailed hours after Tuesday's primaries: 'From the beginning, you and I have counted on one another, working through every challenge and seizing every opportunity. That's not just the way our campaign works. That's the way America works.'
