Barack Obama Meets "Big Mo"

Last weekend, Barack Obama swept five primaries and caucuses. Last night he continued to roll by sweeping the "Potomac primaries" -- Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. These were pretty impressive wins. Obama got more than 60% of the votes in all three primaries.

I don't think there's any doubt that he's the candidate with the momentum right now. He not only won these states by large margins, but he cut into voting groups such as women, Hispanics and lower-income workers that are usually considered to be Clinton's demographic. It's too early to tell if this is just a fluke, or if it is indicative of a large movement toward Obama.

Next up is Hawaii and Wisconsin. It is expected that Hawaii will vote for it's favorite son -- Obama. However, it now looks like Wisconsin is also trending toward Obama. If he wins both, that really puts the pressure on Clinton to win somewhere and stop the Obama momentum.

It looks like she's counting on Texas and Ohio to be the states that will stop that momentum. A month ago, I would have said she would win both by large margins. I don't think that is true anymore -- at least here in Texas. There is a very good chance for Obama to keep it close in Texas (and maybe even win by a thin margin). In any event, I now expect him to do well here and come out with nearly half the delegates.

That could be disastrous for Clinton. She needs to win Texas and Ohio by big margins and get a significant majority of delegates in those states. If she loses either state, or finishes in a virtual tie in both, it would probably be the beginning of the end of her campaign.

For the first time, Clinton has fallen behind in the total delegate count. Obama has had the lead in pledged delegates for a while, but when superdelegates were added in, the lead changed to Clinton. Last night changed that. Now Obama not only leads in pledged delegates, but also has a small lead in total delegates.

This is an unusual situation for Texas voters. A couple of months ago, we were talking about how our late primary would cause us to miss out on the real decision-making this primary season. But now, it looks like our late primary could be the one that makes or breaks one of the campaigns. It may be a long time before this happens again, but it sure is fun this year!

Once again, last night was great for Democrats in general. Democratic voters outnumbered Republican voters by around 3-1 in Maryland. In Virginia, which the Republicans can usually count on, the turnout was at least 2-1 in favor of the Democrats. As in most of the other states that have voted, the Democrats just seem to be much more energized than Republicans, and independents are trending heavily for Democrats.

I would love to see the same thing in Texas (and Ohio).