Why Edwards Still Matters

Super Tuesday is less than a week away, and the Democratic Party has taken one more step towards nominating its candidate for this November’s election. With John Edwards out as of Wednesday, last night’s debate in California was a head to head matchup between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. After a theatrical introduction at the Kodak Theater reminded us that we were, in fact, in Hollywood (as if the numerous shots of celebrities in the audience didn’t get the message across), the two candidates finally took the stage. But even though Edwards is out, the opening statements from Clinton and Obama clearly emphasized his continuing importance to this race. In fact Obama used his first thirty seconds to commend the Edwards campaign, and Clinton echoed Obama in her own opening statement.

Why is the Edwards vote still important? Quite simply because there are enough Edwards supporters to remain important.

Going into this Tuesday, Senator Obama still has a lot of ground to cover. The New York Times reported yesterday that some of the most recent polls predict good things for the junior senator from New York.She has a large lead in states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s clear that a massive victory for either candidate could solidify the party’s nomination, but do these polls tell the whole story? First, polls can be flat out wrong, as we saw in New Hampshire. But even more than that, a simple majority will not win either candidate all of a given state’s delegates. In fact, no Democratic primary or caucus is “winner-take-all” as opposed to certain Republican primaries (think McCain’s victory in Florida). Some delegates are awarded for winning the statewide election, and others according to the number of congressional districts won. In theory, this encourages a truly statewide campaign and discourages only campaigning in the most populous areas. To make matters more confusing, each state allocates its number of delegates differently.

Most importantly, however, is that the polls demonstrate that John Edwards still matters to this race. If you take another look, Clinton is not polling above 50% in any state except New York. There are a large number of “other” or undecided voters, and it’s a safe bet that a large chunk of “other” voters includes supporters of the man who was running third in this primary cycle up until Wednesday. When considering the number of voters that would have voted for John Edwards combined with a standard deviation in all the polls of about 5%, even the big states this Tuesday are still up for grabs.

The reality is that with only days until over twenty states will pledge a combined total of over 1600 delegates, many Edwards supporters will have to choose either Clinton or Obama before the polls close this Tuesday night. Don’t be surprised to see the two remaining candidates trying to court the Edwards vote, as they did last night. Several examples come to mind. When talking about his efforts to curb the influence of special interest groups on politics, Obama added, “That’s something that John Edwards and I both talked about repeatedly in this campaign.” And when Clinton was outlining the differences between Obama’s healthcare plan and her own, she threw in Edwards’s name: “[A]nd I have put forth a plan, similar to what Senator Edwards had before he left the race, that would move us to universal health care.”

With all the hoopla surrounding Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama on Monday and Clinton’s response that she has a few Kennedy’s of her own behind her, it makes me laugh sometimes to think about how much weight we give these endorsements. But make no mistake about it; an Edwards endorsement, or even a mass switch of his former supporters to either Obama or Clinton without his official blessing, could seriously change this race.