by McSnatherson
False Claim #1: Money
So, apparently it's come back in vogue to talk about TEH UNSTOPPABLE POWER OF MONIES. Let's have ourselves a little reality check here, shall we? In the '04 primaries, John Kerry had to mortgage his house for campaign funds as Dean consistently raised 3 times or more than he did. And the end result of that? Kerry ran away with the nomination after taking Iowa, while Dean (more's the pity) fell to a humiliating third. The Moral Of The Story, for any rational observer? Money has a strictly limited value, whatever K Street might like you to believe, and momentum counts for a hell of a lot more. And as noted,
John Edwards is excellently poised to take that momentum.
False Claim #2: Polls
Uh, yeah. This claim is, if anything, even more willfully ignorant of our own recent history here in the Democratic Party. Let's take a look at some national polling reports from the '04 primaries. Let's see - CBS News, as of 1/12-15/04 had Dean in a solid first place with 24%, Clark in second place with 12%, Gephardt in third place with 11%, and poor John Kerry and poor John Edwards just BURIED back at fourth and fifth place with 7% and 5%, respectively. How can those fools possibly carry on?! Don't they know they're DOOMED? Don't they know they're... oh, wait. Here are the numbers from just a little later, as of 2/24-27/04. Kerry is in a runaway first place with 57%, Edwards is bringing up second place with 18%, and the next highest candidate who's even still listed is Al Sharpton with a whopping 4%. Funny how that happened, isn't it? Why, it's almost enough to make a fellow think that anyone who's seriously trying to use national polling or anything similar to it - like, say, polling numbers for the Feb. 5 states - is either stunningly ill-informed or deliberately disingenuous.
False Claim #3: The Black Vote
The claim here in essence appears to be that John Edwards has absolutely zero appeal to black people - which I suspect might come as a surprise to the numerous African-American leaders who've endorsed Edwards (link's from June - sorry I couldn't find a more current list, since I know more have endorsed him since then), by the by - and therefore Hillary Clinton will automagically scoop up all the black support that Obama would hypothetically shed and crush Edwards with it. There's a couple problems with this. First, this simultaneously assumes both that momentum means nothing and Hillary will maintain her vastly inflated poll leads, and that momentum means everything and Obama's black support will abandon him at the snap of a finger, making it available to Hillary. I'm not the only who can see how that's crazy, right? And second, it assumes that Hillary really is the default and necessary alternative for the black community. Look at the numbers quoted in that diary again - Hillary's only polling between 20-30% in both of them, and the low figure (21.2%) is in the state that's had the MOST exposure to her, South Carolina. That's supposed to show that Hillary will smush John Edwards in that demographic, since he still polls much, much worse than her there. But what it actually shows is that when African-Americans actually get exposed to Hillary, it cuts her poll numbers in half from their national levels. That's a sign of WEAKNESS, not of strength. That's only reinforced when you compare the NC and SC numbers again - Hillary's numbers drop by fully 10%, without either of her opponents' numbers going up appreciably. That means that those black voters aren't being lured away by another candidate, they just plain don't like Hillary all that much once they get to know her instead of her national hype. With that in mind, I'd suspect that that 20-30% figure is much closer to the ceiling of Hillary's black support than to the floor. And that means that - especially if Obama crumbles - there's a huge opportunity for Edwards to step in and introduce himself. Remember, his lack of coverage among African-Americans has been just as profound as among other demographics, and blacks are no more immune to the appeal of momentum that I discussed before than anyone else.
False Claim #4: Edwards Can't Win the Other Early States
Ugh. Look, the momentum from Iowa has just as big - if not bigger - effect on the other early states as it does on the national polls. With regards to SC, IIRC roundabouts 50% of likely voters haven't made up their minds yet. In '04 Edwards and the SC electorate were in similar places poll-wise, and in the end they came home to him. It's very far from implausible to think the same thing'll happen this time. With regards to Nevada, the caucus-going population was IIRC ~7,000 last go-round, and Edwards has already gotten endorsements from Nevadan unions with several times that in membership, as well as the endorsement of the 600,000+ member California SEIU right across the border who can drive across and help organize. He's also rumored to be the front-runner for the hugely influential UNITE-HERE endorsement if he picks up even one of the states' prior. Quite frankly, if Edwards wins Iowa, I'd be quite surprised if he doesn't pick up SC (the state where he was born, incidentally) and Nevada as well. New Hampshire I'll concede is iffier, if only because I know less about it. All I can say there is that Edwards has a number of good union endorsements there as well, that polling data show that more often than not New Hampshire follows Iowa, and that the claim that NH isn't amenable to populist appeals is highly dubious - Pat Buchanan won the NH primary back in the day on just such populist appeals after all, albeit from a right-wing angle. On top of that, Edwards is hardly only about economic appeals - he's also the the strongest environmental candidate in the race, and the only candidate to be endorsed by a major environmental organization (Friends of the Earth), which in addition likes him so much they're running an independent expenditure campaign on his behalf in NH. I think we can all agree that the environment is an issue with some resonance in the Northeast, yes?
My Bonus Reasons for Edwards
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