TOCKTON, Calif. - All the numbers are against John McCain.
The strong conservatives in this state side with Governor George W. Bush. Even the moderate conservatives, which is how the manic McCain would describe himself if he ever paused for a moment of reflection, are evenly split between the Arizona senator and the Texas governor. And the Christian conservatives whose leaders McCain lambasted repeatedly this week accounted for one quarter of the Republicans who voted in California's presidential primary four years ago.
But Republicans who worry about numbers are worrying about history, too. This state is so important to the GOP that Republicans put a Californian on their national ticket 10 times in the last 72 years. The Republicans lost California in the last two elections. The great GOP gubernatorial hope of 1998, Dan Lungren, lost the governor's race to Gray Davis by 20 points.
And so as McCain travels about this state, which in November will account for precisely one-fifth of the electoral votes required to win the White House, he is talking about himself as a ''proud, consistent, mainstream conservative'' and he is proclaiming, as he put it here, where the Sacramento Delta meets the Central Valley: ''I can defeat Al Gore while George Bush cannot.''
Maybe. But McCain himself may not be able to beat Bush here, or at least he probably cannot leave Tuesday's California primary with more delegates than Bush. The rules here permit anyone to vote in the GOP primary, but only the votes of Republicans - specially coded at polling stations - will count in the struggle for the 162 convention delegates at stake. That prompts a tantalizing question: What happens if McCain wins the popular vote only to lose the delegate vote?
According to the rules, the loser loses. Though such a result would help Bush continue to roll up delegates, California would stand as a stain on his record, more fodder for McCain's claims that the Republicans are on the verge of anointing as its winner a man who, in November, could be a big loser. McCain's strategists already are mulling how, or whether, they could continue their campaign if the party's head goes to Bush but its heart belongs to McCain.
Meanwhile, McCain is slogging on, the surprise candidate of the campaign encountering surprises at almost every stop. Stockton's Memorial Auditorium holds 2,000 people for dancing, only 900 for McCain's preferred diversions, boxing and wrestling. He attracted a few hundred people on a dreary, rainy day this week, but none was more important than Dorothy Evans, who three decades ago spent $1 for a silver bracelet with the name of a Vietnam prisoner of war on it.
The other morning, in the back of the auditorium, she rolled up her sleeve and there it was, with the lettering unmistakable: LCDR JOHN McCAIN III 10-26-67. ''I prayed for him while he was in prison and through the years shot up little prayers, hoping he could put his imprisonment behind him,'' she whispered. Not until she saw a television advertisement did she know that he was a senator, or a presidential candidate.
At every turn the McCain campaign defies death and the conventional wisdom. In Tacoma this week, the candidate called his political strategy ''the most unheard of campaign in American political history,'' which is perhaps the only McCain statement that Bush hasn't challenged. The senator's strategists, who are prepared to believe anything after a hard loss in South Carolina was followed by easy victories in Michigan and Arizona, believe he still can prevail, even here in California.
He's not hurt by the bitter split between California's social conservatives, who control the GOP Central Committee, and the party's economic libertarians, who write the checks. ''The libertarians see the Central Committee as a business - and it's losing market share for them,'' said Fred Smoller, a political scientist at Chapman University in Orange County. ''They're trying to move the party to the middle. Anything that divides the party leaves room for an insurgent.''
McCain is an insurgent with a difference.
In truth, McCain's courage and what the professionals like to call ''his story'' are just the sort of elements that appeal to Californians, who after all elected the song-and-dance man George Murphy to the Senate in 1964 and sent Ronald Reagan to the governor's chair two years later.
''In a way this is an ideal kind of California campaign,'' said Kenneth L. Khachigian, the San Clemente political wiz who cut his electoral teeth on the campaigns of Richard M. Nixon and Reagan. ''Californians like a fighter and an underdog, and a guy with a great life experience.''
That's as good a description of McCain as any. But it's also a description of the California Republican Party right now.
