Delegate Anderson to lead Marylanders to Ohio on behalf of Obama

Del. Curt Anderson (D-Baltimore) will lead a group of 40 Maryland volunteers on a bus trip to Youngstown, Ohio this weekend to campaign on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

“We are going to try and sway people to vote for Barack Obama,” Anderson said today when contacted by PolitickerMD.com.

The volunteers will be participating in traditional grassroots efforts, such as door-to-door canvassing.

The bus will depart at 4:30 p.m. from the campus of the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and Western High School, located at 1400 W. Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore City.

According to Anderson, there is no charge for the bus trip itself, though volunteers will be required to pay for lodging.

A report on the Thursday night broadcast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams said the Obama campaign had run out of free housing in some states due to the overwhelming number of volunteers.

The delegate said he had been told that 7,000 out-of-state Obama volunteers would converge on the Buckeye State this weekend.

Anderson served in the House of Delegates from 1983-1995. He came back to his old job after being elected in 2002.

Though he leads Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) by more than 100 delegates (including pledged and superdelegates), Obama trails Clinton in Ohio by an average of six points in pre-primary polls released no later than Thursday. He leads his opponent by a slight margin in Texas polls. The two states, which will hold their primaries on Tuesday, have 334 combined delegates.

A Reuters/C-SPAN/Houston Chronicle poll released today, however, showed Obama with a six-point lead in Texas. He had also closed the gap in Ohio to two points. The survey contains a margin of error of 3.8 points.