Hillary Clinton appeared to be losing turf to frontrunner Barack Obama in delegate-rich Ohio and Texas states where her star campaigner and husband Bill Clinton said a defeat would cost her the Democratic presidential nomination.
As the March 4 showdown draws nearer, the one-time formidable candidate Clinton is fighting an uphill battle with political pundits asserting that the New York Democrat must not only win, but do so decisively.
Obama, the 46-year-old African-American Senator, has not only fast caught up with Clinton in Texas, but is inching his way forward in Ohio where Clinton is clinging to a precarious and slim lead.
Both the states at one time were thought of as sure losses for him.
Obama is ahead in the delegate count by nearly 100 and there are 444 delegates up for grabs in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont next week.
Thee stakes for Clinton, 60, could not have been more dramatically described than by her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, who has been campaigning quite feverishly for her in those two large states.
"If she wins Texas and Ohio, I think she will be the nominee. If you don't deliver for her, then I don't think she can be," he said while campaigning in Texas.
In the overall race, Obama leads with 1,362 delegates. Clinton has 1,266.5, getting the half-delegate from the Democrats Abroad primary.
It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination at the party's convention in late August in Denver.
A win in Ohio and Texas will be a shot in the arm for Clinton as her campaign will be able to turn around and argue that Obama is incapable of delivering big states and that too "Red" (Republican) states.
In 2004 George W Bush won handsomely in these two states.
In Texas, which had 228 democratic delegates at stake, Clinton is now in a statistical dead heat with Senator Obama with two polls showing her at 48 per cent against Senator Obama's 46 or 47 per cent.
Ohio has 161 Democratic delegates and Clinton's 21 per cent lead earlier in the month has shrunk to just seven points with at least 12 per cent 'undecideds'.
And polls are showing Clinton up by about 12 points in Rhode Island, but Senator Obama swamps her with a 26 point lead in Vermont.
If Senators Clinton and Obama are having a slug fest in Ohio and Texas, Democratic Party leaders must have started wondering what impact Ralph Nader is going to have on the presidential election.
The 73-year-old Nader announced on Sunday that he will be in the fray determined to make the voices of the "many" as opposed to a few heard in the political system.
In 2000 Nader won nearly three per cent of the national vote as some Democrats angrily accused him of costing Al Gore the presidency, a charge the Green Party candidate rejected.
In 2004, Nader ran as an independent and secured only 0.3 per cent of the national vote and appeared on the ballot in only 34 states.
