January 27, 2008
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I definitely lean towards Barack Obama amongst the current crop of presidential candidates, and I
think his larger-than-expected
landslide win in
South Carolina is obviously a huge story (with Caroline Kennedy’s
endorsement a huge symbolic lift as well). But the second story has to
be that John Edwards may have won the white vote in South Carolina (at least according to exit polls, where he appeared to have a slight edge over Clinton). It was a
dynamic very similar to that in Iowa in 2004 — the two leading
candidates attacked each other, voters (or white voters, in SC) got
turned off and looked for an alternative candidate. One difference is
that race was also injected into the primary, both by the campaigns and
by the media, and that may have further polarized the race. (Given such
circumstances, getting 24% of the white vote for Obama wasn’t bad,
although it wasn’t great either. Nevertheless it allowed him a
landslide victory.)John Edwards can’t talk about winning the white vote
publicly in such stark terms, but I am sure his campaign sees winning the white vote as a
kind of pseudo-victory, and a harbinger of how they might succeed in
states with
large majorities of white voters. He has to hope that the Clinton and Obama campaigns
get stuck in the mud,
and that the media continues to fail to scrutinize the Edwards
campaign, while he
continues to look good in debates, and that voters (particularly white
voters) turned off by the
mud (regardless of whether it is one-sided or not) will turn to
Edwards. Even if he isn’t the front runner, if he can make it a
three-way race going to the convention, with no one with a majority of
delegates, he might actually have a chance at the nomination if he is
close enough or even slightly ahead of one or two of the others. At the
very least he would be a serious player in the convention, perhaps as ‘kingmaker,’ and he could
ensure himself of a prominent place in Democratic party politics now
and in the future.I
would suspect that the Clinton campaign has taken note of this, and
will back off their attacks on Obama. If attacking Obama simply drives
both Clinton and Obama votes towards Edwards, even if Clinton comes out
slightly ahead of Obama that ultimately could hurt Hillary Clinton if
her overall delegate count goes down. That is, unless she feels she can
work out a deal with John Edwards at the convention (which may explain
why she approached him to talk after one of the recent debates).
