The Sable Verity

ABC News’ Karen Travers Reports: For the first time this campaign season, Barack Obama has surpassed Hillary Clinton’s support among superdelegates, according to the ABC News delegate estimate. 

Sen. Obama, D-Ill., picked up two superdelegates this morning giving him a new metric to tout in addition to his current commanding leads in pledged delegates, popular votes, states won, and money raised.

Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., endorsed Obama. DeFazio was previously uncommitted.

With these endorsements, Obama has the support of 267 superdelegates and Clinton has 265 superdelegates.

Every news organization’s superdelegate count is a little different because it is an imperfect science. Since October 2007, the Political Unit has continuously reached out to the nearly 800 superdelegates to determine their candidate preference. We also reach out regularly to the Obama and Clinton campaigns for their superdelegate lists and work to confirm any that they include on their lists.

Clinton’s advantage among superdelegates was once massive and has been dwindling steadily since Super Tuesday, when she was ahead by over 60 superdelegates.

Clinton’s institutional support from within the Democratic Party allowed her to build a commanding lead in superdelegates over Obama in the early part of this nomination battle.

Despite several rough weeks on the campaign trail, Obama has maintained momentum in picking up superdelegates. Obama has outpaced Clinton at every marker of this campaign since Super Tuesday — after the controversial comments of Rev. Wright came out, after Clinton’s big win in Pennsylvania and after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

Below are the superdelegate tallies, as of this morning, from other news organizations:

ABC
OBAMA 267
CLINTON 265

CBS
CLINTON  271
OBAMA 261

CNN
CLINTON 268
OBAMA 258

NBC
CLINTON 274
OBAMA 260

AP
CLINTON 271
OBAMA 256

New York Times
CLINTON 263
OBAMA 258

Politico
CLINTON 268.5
OBAMA 260

Washington Post (uses AP statistics)
CLINTON 271
OBAMA 256