John Edwards Killed Hillary Clinton

Fer Real

Wolfson: Edwards' Cover-up Cost Clinton the Nomination

Aides Say She Would Have Won Iowa if Edwards Affair was Exposed
By BRIAN ROSS and JAKE TAPPER August 11, 2008

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com

The whining alone is disgusting and symbolic of why I never, ever wanted HRC to even run...

But then it's the complete lack of factual basis upon which to base the whine that is plain alarming, as pointed in out in an article lovingly entitled Why Howard Wolfson Is Out Of A Job

Iowa actually didn't turn out to be that close, with Obama defeating Edwards by 7.9 points and Hillary Clinton by 8.1 points. For Clinton to have beaten Obama, she would have needed (as Wolfson correctly points out) about two-thirds of those Edwards voters.

The thing about Iowa, however, is that unlike virtually any other electoral contest, second choices matter, since Democratic caucus rules dictate that a voter may caucus for her second-choice candidate if her first choice does not achieve the 15 percent of the vote required for viability. As such, Iowa pollsters did a lot of work in trying to determine voters' second choices. And in virtually every survey, Clinton did rather poorly as a second choice: an average of several surveys in December showed that she was the second choice of about 20 percent of voters, as compared with 25 percent for Obama and Edwards (an even later version I have sitting on my hard drive showed the second-choice breakdown as Edwards 30, Obama 28.5, Clinton 23.5)

So the odds are that, if John Edwards had dropped out on the morning before the Iowa caucus, Obama would have won by more points rather than fewer.

It was also the case that Barack Obama appeared to get the lion's share of Edwards supporters once Edwards dropped from the race.