Talk to any of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s devoted supporters for longer than five minutes, and it’s easy to walk away with the impression that many of them have bought into her team’s carefully cultivated hype.

The nomination is her due. “It’s her turn,” you see? And after a period in which the press will manufacture the appearance of a competitive election for the sake of ratings and newspaper circulation, Clinton will win the presidency. Her margin of victory might be smaller if the GOP nominates a milquetoast moderate like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, but whoever the Republican Party nominates is ultimately irrelevant. The Hillary Clinton juggernaut cannot be stopped, and resistance is futile.

It’s all nonsense, but these are key elements to the personality cult that Clinton backers have spent the last six years attempting to rebuild following its utter destruction at the hands of Iowa’s Democratic caucus-goers. Clinton is far from inevitable, and there is precious little evidence to indicate that this election will be an easy one for her to win.

For starters, an incumbent party seeking a third term in the White House faces historically strong headwinds as voters grow restless. This feat was only accomplished once in the post-war period. And that achievement was secured by a sitting Vice President of the United States amid near unprecedented prosperity at home and the imminent prospect of the end of America’s longest war abroad. It is safe to say that Clinton will not be the beneficiary of those factors that propelled George H. W. Bush into the Oval Office in 1988.

Acknowledging this, partisan Democrats say that times and the country have changed. Demography, dear boy, is destiny. Clinton’s fortunes will be buoyed by the ascendant coalition of Democratic voters that have proven twice that they can swamp the GOP’s aging and predominantly white supporters. On the arms of the young, the single, women, and minorities, Clinton will be carried into the White House to cement Barack Obama’s legacy and her own.

There is, however, virtually no evidence that Barack Obama’s coalition of voters is synonymous with the Democratic Party’s coalition. With the possible exception of Virginia’s gubernatorial election in 2013, the electorate that has turned out in every election in which Obama was not on the ballot did not even remotely resemble John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Emerging Democratic Majority.

Obama himself acknowledged that Clinton will have to go about building her own coalition of American voters by presenting a compelling vision and relying on her charisma and force of personality. “I don’t think any president inherits a coalition,” Obama told BuzzFeed in February. “I think any candidate has to win over people based on what they stand for, what their message is, what their vision is for the future.”

After a deep dive into the data, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza agreed with Obama’s assessment.

It seems very unlikely that Clinton will be able to replicate Obama’s performance among black voters given the historic nature of his candidacy as the first African American presidential nominee. Ditto Obama’s massive margins among young voters because, well, Obama’s candidacy in 2008 was exciting and cool for many young people. While Clinton’s candidacy inspires excitement among some groups — more on that in a minute — young people are not, to date, one of them.

Whether Clinton can match or better Obama’s performance among Hispanics depends in large part on what Republicans do (or don’t do) over the next 15 months on immigration policy and whom they nominate for president. If Republicans nominate, say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, both of whom have called for a kindler, gentler message toward Hispanics from their party, it seems unlikely that Clinton could match Obama’s performance. If, on the other hand, Republicans pick Ted Cruz, whose hard-line immigration policies appeal to many people in the Republican base, you could see Clinton equal or even improve on Obama’s margin from 2008.

Finally, the field upon which Clinton will compete for her 270 Electoral College votes will have changed quite a bit from the one upon which Obama triumphed in 2008. In the midst of razing another prevalent Democratic myth, one which holds that the president’s party can count on at least 242 electoral votes from the jump, The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter determined that both parties actually enter the race from a position of near parity.

“At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a permanent Electoral College coalition,” she wrote. “From 1968-1992, Republicans had a pretty solid hold on the Electoral College, regularly racking up wins in what are now the dark-blue states of California, Illinois and New Jersey. Back in 1992, no one would have predicted that West Virginia would be a pillar of the GOP Electoral College strategy.”

That said, finding a path to victory requires more than just swapping one part of the country for another. Where Democrats have been successful in presidential contests is in their ability to not simply run up the score among minority voters, but in holding onto white voters in the Midwest and west. White working-class voters and older white voters have shifted their allegiance to Republicans over the last few years, but to win in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the GOP nominee will have to do well among younger, single and college-educated women. Moreover, we sometimes get a bit too attached to data points and cross-tabs. At the end of the day, a successful candidate is the one who has a message that appeals to the most people possible. Without the message, the meta-data and statistical benchmarks are meaningless.

In other words, war room strategizing only gets a candidate so far. In the end, the candidate who emerges victorious from a presidential race is the candidate who made the better case to the American public. For all the Democratic Party’s self-affirmations about Clinton’s inevitability, they have not made the case for her value as a candidate. After this weekend, that process will begin. It will not be an easy mission.