page_title: Barack Obama 2008 presidential primary campaign
section_title: March primaries
hierarchical_section_title: Barack Obama 2008 presidential primary campaign / Caucuses and primaries 2008 / March primaries
caption_attribution_description: English: Barack Obama at the Nutter Center, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, February 25, 2008.
context_page_description: On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then-junior United States Senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Springfield, Illinois. Obama announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol building, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his "House Divided" speech. Obama was the main challenger, along with John Edwards, to front-runner Hillary Clinton for much of 2007. He had only recently emerged as a national figure in Democratic politics, having delivered the DNC keynote address just three years prior and won his Senate election shortly thereafter.
  Obama's initial victory in the Iowa caucus in January 2008 helped bring him to national prominence from a crowded field of Democratic challengers. Obama benefited from early support from prominent Democrats including Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy, and his campaign began to trade a series of hard-fought state wins with Clinton through Super Tuesday, in which Obama had great success in large rural states and Clinton was nearly as dominant in high-population coastal areas.
context_section_description: Obama and Clinton were in a statistical dead heat in Texas, according to a poll released February 25, 2008. During Obama's sweep of February's post-Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, the March 4 primaries of Texas and Ohio were seen as a firewall for the Clinton campaign. In early polls for these states, Clinton held double digit leads in polls for those states, but by the end of February Obama had started to erode Clinton's lead in her key demographics, and her lead had been reduced to single digits in some polls. In response to Obama's increases, Clinton's campaign began to increase their attacks on him, including an accusation of plagiarism due to similarities in Obama's campaign speeches and campaign speeches of Obama's campaign's national co-chair and Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, although Patrick specifically stated he told Obama to use it. During the February 21, CNN-Univision debate in Austin, Texas Obama responded to the accusation by saying, "The notion that I had plagiarized from somebody who's one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested that I use it, I think is silly." Clinton received a round of boos from the crowd when she responded, "Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in; it's change you can Xerox."
  On February 25, 2008, during the hotly contested primaries in Texas and Ohio, Obama appeared at rallies in both Cincinnati and—for the first time in his career—in Dayton, Ohio. The noontime audience at the Fifth Third Arena at the University of Cincinnati was estimated at 13,000. That evening, in Fairborn, just outside Dayton, Obama spoke before a capacity audience estimated at over 11,000 at the Nutter Center, at Wright State University. Speaking for just under an hour, Obama charged the audience with an equal responsibility in "making things happen". According to the Dayton Daily News, "Sen. Barack Obama packed the Nutter Center like a rock star ... painting himself as a man who will cut through petty partisanship and bring real change to Washington."
  In Ohio, as part of the campaign's self proclaimed goal to knock on a million doors the weekend immediately before the primary, Patrick and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius spoke to Obama volunteers at volunteer rallies across the state on March 1 and 2, 2008. Obama, who had won the eleven contests in February after Super Tuesday, claimed victory in the Vermont primary and the Texas Democratic caucuses, on March 4, 2008, but lost the primaries in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island.
  On March 8, 2008, Obama won the Wyoming caucus by nineteen points. The Clinton camp continued to suggest that Obama would make a good vice presidential candidate for Clinton, and former President Bill Clinton made known his support of this as a "dream ticket" which would be an "almost unstoppable force". On March 10, Obama flatly rejected such suggestions. Obama noted that he, not  Clinton, held the lead in pledged delegates and that he had won more of the popular vote than Clinton. "I don't know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to somebody who is in first place", he said. He told supporters in Columbus, Mississippi, that Clinton's VP suggestion was an example of what he called "the old okey-doke", further stating that the Clinton camp was trying to "bamboozle" or "hoodwink" voters. Obama wondered aloud why the Clinton campaign believed him competent for the vice presidency, but said he was "not ready" to be president. Obama stated that the nomination process would have to be a choice between himself and Clinton, saying "I don't want anybody here thinking that 'Somehow, maybe I can get both'," by nominating Clinton as president and assuming he would be her running mate". Some suggested that it was a ploy by the Clinton campaign to denigrate Obama as less qualified for the presidency.
  On March 11, 2008, Obama won the Mississippi primary. There, Obama won approximately 90 percent of the black vote, compared to Clinton's 70 percent majority of white voters. On March 11, 2008, D
caption: Barack Obama speaking at the Nutter Center, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, February 25, 2008
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