On a day when Barack Obama appealed to thousands of Texas supporters to add momentum to his surging campaign, the Illinois senator received boosts from two influential superdelegates.
State Rep. Senfronia Thompson of Houston defected from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign Wednesday and joined a growing list of superdelegates to endorse Obama for president.
"I'm honored to have earned the support of Representative Thompson and am pleased that she'll play an important role in advancing our grassroots movement for change in Houston and across Texas," Obama said in a statement. "Throughout her three decades in the Legislature, she's been a tireless advocate for working families and when I'm president we'll work together to put the American dream within reach of every child in Texas and across our country."
Thompson, one of the longest serving Democrats in the state House, is one of the party insiders who, as a superdelegate, help choose the Democratic nominee at the national convention this summer in Denver. In recent weeks, more than two dozen superdelegates have climbed aboard Obama's campaign.
Her defection was the second loss of the day for Clinton. Civil rights leader and Atlanta congressman John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Atlanta, is the most prominent black leader to defect from Clinton's campaign in the face of recent near-unanimous black support for Obama.