By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama scored a presidential primary victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday that will nudge up his narrow lead in delegates over New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — and more importantly, enable him to claim continued momentum that has been building since his near-even split of the Super Tuesday voting spree Feb. 5. He also won the Hawaii caucuses and the non-binding Washington state primary.

Though Obama had led in most pre-primary polls in Wisconsin, his actual vote share was bigger than those polls indicated it would be. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Obama had 58 percent of the vote to 41 percent for Clinton. His victory was clinched by strong performances in Milwaukee — home to most of Wisconsin’s black voters, who in turn came out strongly to support Obama’s bid to become the nation’s first black president — and in the state capital of Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin, where Obama’s strong appeal to younger voters seen in many other states was again borne out.

Obama’s appeal was not limited to those areas, though. He was leading Clinton in all eight of the state’s congressional districts in incomplete returns.

The worries extend beyond the raw vote numbers for Clinton, as she prepares for key March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio that loom as must-win situations for her unexpectedly stumbling campaign. Exit poll numbers from Wisconsin reinforced trends seen since Super Tuesday, in which Obama has cut into support groups that had been seen as pillars of Clinton’s support base.

According to exit poll data posted on CNN’s Web site, Clinton was able only to split the votes of women with Obama, 50 percent to 50 percent, while Obama dominated among men voters, 67 percent to 31 percent.

Clinton’s campaign strategy was, in fact, predicated in part on an expected big advantage among women voters, who were expected to be strongly attracted by the candidate’s bid to become the first woman president. And public opinion polls taken during the long run-up period to the actual campaign, when former first lady Clinton held big overall leads in candidate preference polls, suggested she would sustain such support, as she led by double-digit percentages among women.

But the charismatic Obama’s meteoric campaign, in which he is seeking to become the nation’s first black president, has not only erased Clinton’s appeal to most black women voters, but also has cut deeply into her support among younger white women. This slippage was reinforced not only by the Wisconsin results but also by a Gallup poll that showed her lead among women nationally over Obama had slipped from a 53 percent to 38 percent advantage in a survey taken Feb. 5-9 to a statistically insignificant 46 percent to 45 percent in a Feb. 13-17 poll.

The Gallup poll also showed dramatic slippage in Clinton’s national support among voters of ages 35 to 54. Respondents in this group favored Clinton in the early February poll by 49 percent to 42 percent. But a little more than a week later, Obama had shot ahead among these voters by 51 percent to 42 percent.

And, in an erosion that could have devastating effects for Clinton if it is felt to similar effect in Texas, Clinton’s national support against Obama among Hispanics flipped from 63 percent to 32 percent positive to 46 percent-50 percent negative in the same short period of time.

Wisconsin does not register voters by party, so its primary was open, meaning that any voter regardless of party affiliation could participate in either primary. As has been the case in some other open primary situations this year, Obama dominated Clinton among independent voters and Republicans who participated in the Democratic primary. Clinton held her own only among white Democratic voters.

The influx of crossover voters into the Democratic Party, combined with the lesser intensity in the less competitive Republican nominating fight, elevated the partisan “enthusiasm gap” seen throughout the presidential voting schedule so far to monumental proportions in Wisconsin. More than a million votes had been recorded in the Democratic primary to just more than 400,000 in the Republican primary — this in a state that typically is competitive in statewide elections, as underscored by Democratic nominee John Kerry ’s narrow 1 percentage-point victory margin over President Bush in 2004.

Because of the proportional allocation rules that govern Democratic nominating events, Obama will end up with a fairly modest majority of the 74 pledged delegates at stake Tuesday in Wisconsin (a state that also has 18 unpledged “superdelegates,” for a total of 92 who will represent Wisconsin at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August). Obama entered Tuesday with a lead of 1,235 delegates to 1,20 delegates for Clinton, according to the Associated Press. Hawaii, which has a total of 29 Democratic delegates, held party caucuses later on Tuesday.

Yet the Wisconsin win, Obama’s ninth consecutive primary or caucus victory since Super Tuesday, increased the urgency that the Clinton camp will feel heading into the next round of primaries scheduled for March 4. That date will feature key primaries in the delegate-rich states of Texas, where Obama held a rally Tuesday night, and Ohio, where Clinton spoke to cheering supporters.

Speaking at a packed sports arena in Houston, Obama frequently tailored his speech to his Texas audience, noting the local take on trade, education and health care, among other issues. He also engaged in sort of a give-and-take with Arizona Sen. John McCain , who took another big step toward clinching the Republican presidential nomination with his own win in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

In remarks made earlier in the evening to supporters in Columbus, Ohio, McCain did not call out Obama by name, but juxtaposed himself against the Illinois Democrat as the possible Democratic nominee — leveling barely veiled criticisms at Obama as too inexperienced, especially on defense and foreign policy matters, to be president.

Obama’s comments about Arizona Sen. John McCain were not new to him, but they did create a sense of a long-distance debate for those who watched both candidates’ comments. “I revere and honor his service to this country, he is a genuine American hero,” Obama said of McCain, who was a Vietnam War POW. “But when he embraces George Bush’s failed economic policies, when he says he’s willing to send our troops into another 100 years in Iraq, then he represents the policies of yesterday and I want to be the candidate of tomorrow. And I’m looking forward to having that debate with John McCain .”

Obama also took jabs at Clinton, who remains close behind Obama in the delegate race.

“I’m not running because I think it’s owed to me,” Obama said. “I’m running because of what Dr. [Martin Luther] King called the ‘fierce urgency of now’. . . And that moment is upon us. We are at a defining point in history.”

Clinton made critical references to Obama during her speech in Youngstown, Ohio, though she lost the competition for airtime, as networks cut away minutes into Clinton’s event to carry Obama’s own pre-scheduled rally.

Clinton hammered home her campaign message of providing “solutions.” She contends consistently that Obama is inexperienced and merely provides “promises” and “words” to voters.

“We can’t just have speeches. We’ve got to have solutions. And we need those solutions for America,” Clinton said. “While words matter, the best words in the world aren’t enough unless you match them with action.”

The crossfire extended the sparring in which Clinton and Obama had engaged in Wisconsin. Clinton aired a television commercial in Wisconsin faulting Obama for rejecting an offer to debate Clinton prior to the state’s primary. Obama hit back at Clinton with his own ad, noting that there had been 18 previous debates; he also criticized Clinton’s health care and housing plans.

Clinton’s campaign had set the bar low for Wisconsin, noting after the Feb. 12 “Potomac Primary,” in which Clinton lost contests in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., that the campaign would shift its focus to the March 4 events in Texas and Ohio and the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, another big delegate state.

The economy, according to exit polling, was the top issue for Democratic voters in Wisconsin, with opposition to free trade accords a major undercurrent. Clinton has worked to separate her stance on trade from the record created on that issue by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law — a particularly nettlesome issue for many in organized labor and a number of individual voters who see that and other similar agreements as killing jobs in the United States.

Clinton released an economic “blueprint” in Wisconsin this week and attempted to capitalize on her long-standing campaign focus on America’s middle class.

Moments before the polls closed in Wisconsin, Clinton’s campaign released an e-mail outlining her trade agenda, the first item of which is “fixing NAFTA.”

Obama, meanwhile, proposed a “Patriot Employer” plan Monday in Ohio to prevent jobs from being sent overseas and to help employers create more U.S. jobs. Obama’s campaign highlighted that Ohio’s manufacturing industry has been greatly altered by overseas markets, citing statistics from the Manufacturers Directory that show the state lost 32,337 manufacturing jobs and 93 plants in 2006 alone.

In the Hawaii caucuses, with two-thirds of the vote counted as of early morning Wednesday, Obama led 76 percent to Clinton’s 24 percent. Obama was born and raised in Hawaii and attended Punahou Academy, an elite private school in Honolulu.

Washington state held a primary contest Tuesday, but the election was completely non-binding for the Democratic Party, which is using the results of its Feb. 9 caucuses to allocate delegates. Obama held a 2-to-1 lead over Clinton in that contest with 96 percent of votes reported Feb. 19. The “beauty contest” primary result was much closer, though, with Obama defeating Clinton by just 50 percent to 47 percent.

CQ Politics’ Grigs Crawford contributed to this story.