Obama and Clinton Fight to March 4; Obama Sends Tewes to Ohio

By any measure, Hillary Clinton seems to have won a narrow delegate victory last night. It underlines her strength and that she is the person to beat.

But the schedule the rest of February tends to favor Obama, and he’ll have chances to make up ground. (Although Clinton is hardly to just sit back and allow him to do that; expect heavy campaigning by Clinton this week in the Virginia and Maryland areas, for instance.)

But that’s not Clinton’s firewall. Her firewalls are now Ohio and Texas. Noam Scheiber explains:

And then we wait two weeks and throw-down in Texas and Ohio, at which point a lot of people think this competition could end. (Rhode Island and Vermont also go that day.) Between the Latinos in Texas and Hillary’s establishment support in Ohio, those will almost certainly be her firewall states. On the other hand, Obama is going to have two weeks to focus on those two states alone. Between his near-certain money advantage, the momentum he’ll pick up from the intervening contests, and the fact that he tends to do pretty well in states where he has time to campaign, I think you have to give him the overall edge going forward.

If Obama was going to lose NY and California on one day, he’d certainly draw it up to win as many states as did last night on the same night. If his poll numbers keep moving up, he’s absorbed the biggest punch Clinton can throw. On the other hand, if they don’t …

But in the meantime, he can only go to work on the states coming up. To that end in a little seen move, Obama sent his Iowa field director Paul Tewes to get Ohio ready. Tewes will have a month to swing Ohio, compared to the long run he had in Iowa.

I’m not going to bother blogging about the spin from either side. What matters from this point is delegates and how people perceive last night to have gone. And since we don’t have data on the latter, I’ll just link to the former.

Update: Halperin has Obama’s estimated delegate count for the night, which has Obama slightly ahead, 845-836.