Polls, Polls and More March 4 Polls; And More Delegates, Too

Since we've been keeping you up to date on polls on the Texas Democratic primary and Ohio Democratic primary all week, we might as well keep it up.

Here's the latest out of Texas, which shows Obama consolidating his small lead:

Reuters/Zogby (which we think has had a spotty record this primary season) has Obama up by six points, 48%-42%.

Fox News has Obama up 48%-45%.

Of the last eight polls out of Texas (conducted Feb. 22-28), only one had Hillary up, one had a tie and the rest gave Obama a small lead.

Of course, if you go back to New Hampshire, you'll see a similar pattern, so don't get too excited yet.

Then there's the so-called "Texas two-step": Texans don't only vote in a primary next Tuesday, they also caucus. Why, we're not sure, but about a third of the Texas delegates are up for grabs in the caucus and Obama may have an advantage there. He also has an advantage in the way the primary delegates are divvied up (we won't go into the details, but essentially, Hispanic south Texas, where Hillary is favored, will have disproportionately few delegates).

Bottom line: no matter what, Obama should rack up more delegates than Hillary in Texas.

In Ohio, we have three new polls, showing the race tight, but still leaning Hillary's way:

Rasmussen has it as a two point margin for Senator Clinton, 47%-45%.

Reuters/Zogby also has it a two point ballgame for Hillary, 44%-42%.

But Fox News gives Hillary a bigger margin, 8 points, at 46%-38%. Seems like a lot of undecideds there (and in Reuters) so it could break either way.

While we're here, we noted that in the RealClearPolitics.com delegate count, Barack Obama jumped from about 1279 delegates yesterday to 1384 today (and Hillary also went up, by about 95 delegates). Since there were no nominating contests between today and yesterday, we're wondering where all those new delegates came from! We wish RCP (and other outlets with delegate counts) would footnote their tallies, or provide a brief blurb when updates are made, to let us know where the newbies came from.