Donald Trump has gone through one of the rockiest initial spans of any presumptive Republican presidential nominee in memory.

And yet Hillary Clinton still lost the week.

It's an odd paradox that helps explain a 2016 campaign in which both parties are saddled with inherently flawed candidates who appear completely capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Since last Wednesday – when Trump finally rid himself of his remaining primary opponent – he has faced deep, devoted resistance throughout the traditional GOP apparatus. Two of his former competitors said they could not vote for him (Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham), at least three have remained noncommittal (Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina) and others who have expressed faint support have barely mentioned his name (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul).

The last two sitting Republican presidents – both named Bush – signaled their distaste for Trump by declaring they'd sit out the campaign completely. Mitt Romney, the party's 2012 standard-bearer, said he would not cast a ballot for his 2016 successor.

Trump entered a stand-off of sorts with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was withholding his endorsement ahead of a meeting between the two in Washington on Thursday. And a patch of conservatives – led by The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol – began openly courting third-party options that would essentially doom Trump's chances in November.

Then came Tuesday, when a trio of battleground state general election polls dropped into the inboxes of the political intelligentsia with a disorienting thud. Surprise (!) – the numbers showed that despite all the disunity, resistance and hand-wringing, The Donald was competitive with Clinton. The tales of a great blowout were, in fact, blown out of proportion: Quinnipiac University polling placed Trump essentially tied with Clinton in Florida and Pennsylvania and ahead of her in Ohio. Even critics who quibbled the survey's sampling could not deny these were single-digit, margin-of-error contests.

The icing on top: Trump begins in a marginally better place than Romney did in 2012. At this same point in the race, the former Massachusetts governor was behind President Barack Obama by 8 points in Pennsylvania ; Trump is down just 1 point to Clinton. In Ohio , Obama was ahead of Romney by 1 point; Trump leads Clinton by 4. In Florida , Romney led Obama by 1 point; Trump is down by 1 point.

On Tuesday night, as Trump rolled to easy victories as nominee-to-be in the West Virginia and Nebraska primaries, there was Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old steadfast socialist, scoring another victory against Clinton. The Vermont senator not only won West Virginia – he trampled her in a 15-point rout that marked her biggest drop in support in any state from her 2008 White House bid.

Propelled by rolling cable television coverage – which repeatedly flashed the Quinnipiac numbers on full-screen graphics – and the dizzying Twittersphere – which now had more reason to buzz about Bernie's staying power – Trump looked like the winner and Clinton, a limp loser.

The ability of the New York City billionaire to fight Clinton to a draw out of the gate – amid considerable intraparty tumult – underlined the fact that the former secretary of state remains a decisively weak front-runner who is still in search of a compelling rationale for her candidacy, other than that choosing Trump would be worse.

Many in the GOP grumble that almost any other Republican contender would lead Clinton significantly at this point. But the mere fact that Trump doesn't begin the race in a double-digit hole – after all of his incendiary remarks, reversals in positions and flouting of political convention – has to be unsettling to Democrats.

"This election cycle, nothing is easy," Clinton's national political director Amanda Renteria told U.S. News in an interview last week. "The media follows him, there's always something happening. It's being covered in an entirely different way. The whole world of social media is playing a different role."

Renteria says she believes the traditional battleground states – Florida, Ohio and Virginia – would remain the most competitive this year. The only question to her is whether more of them would emerge. But the early assumption that it would be Clinton – and not Trump – who puts additional states in play may be mistaken.

Clinton's struggle with white working-class voters from economically ravaged areas was on display again in West Virginia on Tuesday night. The Mountain State is expected to fall safely in Trump's column come fall, but the New Yorker is already eyeing bordering Pennsylvania – the sixth closest battleground in 2012, which Romney lost by 5 points – as a state that he could flip based on his visceral connection with those same distressed voters that have been abandoning her.

Like in many spots around the country, the campaign there could become a race to the bottom.

"Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are locked in Pennsylvania and they have similar, awful numbers on honesty and favorability," noted Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

The short-term risk for Clinton over the next four weeks is that she'll continue to suffer losses to Sanders that will take more shine off of her inevitability. A cluster of Western states that vote on June 7 – including Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and California – could deliver results that bruise her just as she looks to bring the party together ahead of the Democratic convention.

All the while, she'll have to keep at least one eye trained on Trump, who Renteria says now generates approximately 85 percent of the incoming inquiries from the media.

"It's a split mind we're in," she says, adding, "we're not at 85 percent operationally yet for the general."

Renteria says Clinton would respond to Trump's relentless barrage of verbal barbs by talking about their stark differences on policy, for instance, highlighting his claim during a November debate that "wages [are] too high."

But in the midst of what's apparently an already competitive general election campaign – reinforced by a Reuters/Ipsos survey out Wednesday showing Clinton's national lead dwindling to just a single-point – keeping it high-minded and substantive is easier promised than delivered.

On Wednesday, though, Clinton couldn't resist a dig on Trump's refusal to release his taxes before the election.