If the polls are to be believed, Andy Burnham should be a very worried man.
The former bookies' favourite to be the next Labour leader is now trailing left-wing insurgent Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be on course for a remarkable victory.
Having already been beaten to the job by Ed Miliband in 2010, the prospect of losing out again should presumably leave Mr Burnham in despair.
But speaking as ballot papers are sent out to more than 600,000 Labour members, affiliates and registered supporters, he remains convinced that this is his moment.
"I feel I'm the right person for the times," he says.
"Labour's lost the support of people who traditionally voted for us in Scotland, across the North and into the Midlands and that is our big job in terms of winning back those people.
"They haven't left us because we were not left-wing enough, it's because we were out of touch on immigration, we weren't doing enough to help self-employed people. Those kinds of issues are what lost us a lot of support. I feel I'm the best placed person to win that back."
Unlike rival candidates Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, Mr Burnham has said he would be willing to serve in a Corbyn shadow cabinet, and has so far stopped short of making direct attacks on the veteran backbencher.
With the deadline for voting just a month away, however, he said the party risked stepping 30 years back in time if it elects serial rebel Mr Corbyn.
He said: "The risk is that Labour becomes internally focused as we were in the mid-80s rather than a united opposition, and that is something that people do have to think about as they open up their ballot paper. Can the party be united behind Jeremy? I think that is very difficult.
"While I will do my best, is this party capable of being united behind Jeremy as leader? I think there is real doubts about that, partly because will he be able to command the loyalty of the Parliamentary Labour Party?
"Politics is a team sport. If you play it that way you can expect loyalty off people, but if you've rebelled 500 times it's not easy then to say to the PLP 'I want you to back me 100%'. People thinking of voting for Jeremy have to make a real judgement call. Are they voting for a disunited party if they vote for him?"
Mr Burnham says the vote on the Government's welfare bill, on which Labour abstained despite his own misgivings, was "a decisive moment" in the leadership contest.
He admits he considered resigning and leading a rebellion against his party's position, but decided against it.
"I would have been behaving not as me to try and win and I'm not prepared to try and win this being somebody else," he says
"But because of what I've done I can unite the party and I struggle to see how Jeremy can do that."
The Burnham camp insist that while public polls give Mr Corbyn a huge lead, their own data suggests the race is much tighter.
The figures put Mr Corbyn on 35%, Mr Burnham on 31%, Yvette Cooper on 23% and Liz Kendall on 11%.
Based on those figures, they insist Mr Burnham would beat Mr Corbyn 52% to 48% in the final run-off.
Mr Burnham says: "We're pretty sure that I'm the only one that can beat Jeremy.
"Almost consistently throughout the whole thing Yvette has been third behind me and, in our polling, some distance third.
"I'm pretty confident that I'm the only one who can beat him and that's based on analysis of all the polls since the race began."
But if he comes up short, Mr Burnham insists he won't become Labour's answer to Ken Clarke by running for leader a third time.
"If my moment is to happen, it will be now," he says. "If I don't win this time I definitely won't be standing again."