Edwards Delegates

[silverscreenselect]

Now that Edwards has dropped out, what will happen to the delegates he won?

Well, the 12 delegates he won in NH and SC will still go to the Democratic convention as uncommitted delegates. Any superdelegates who endorsed him (which weren't binding anyway) are now officially uncommitted until they endorse someone else.

No one has actually won any delegates in IA yet. Edwards (along with Richardson, Kucinich and Biden) has won delegates to the county conventions in March. They will be free to vote for whomever they choose in the county conventions when they select state delegates who will then pick the final delegates to the national convention. So, the final delegate total in IA could shift in either direction.

And the Edwards dropout is just one more reason the polls are horribly inaccurate in primary states. In the general election, there are few momentum shifting events after the national conventions, usually only the Presidential debates or something out of the ordinary like the Swift boat situation. This gives voters plenty of time to digest the status of the race and make their decisions, and lots of time (a couple of weeks or more usually) right before the election in which nothing significant happens. Gradual shifts in momentum do happen but they are easy to track.

In the primaries, you essentially get an entire campaign worth of major momentum shifting events crammed into a few days. We've had the SC primary on Saturday, the Kennedy endorsement on Monday, the FL primary on Tuesday (and it will have some effect on the race), the Edwards announcement today, the debate tomorrow and who knows what over the weekend. The two things all the polls agree on is that a lot of voters make up their minds close to the election and they don't want to be told by voters in a handful of small states (or national media) who to vote for. This makes for a very volatile polling atmosphere and polls which are often hopelessly out-of-date in a day or two.