Demconwatch: "What happens to Edwards' delegates?"

[Laura PourMeADrink]

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/

What happens to Edwards' delegates?
With John Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama this evening, the question everyone is asking is, "What happens to Edwards' pledged delegates?"

Well, the first answer, is nothing. As we were reminded yesterday, pledged delegates can vote for anybody at any time. So, rules-wise, Edwards' endorsement is meaningless.

However, from a political and practical viewpoint, pledged delegates will keep their pledge to vote for the candidate they were elected for until "released" by that candidate. By endorsing Obama, Edwards finally ended his campaign, which had been "suspended" up to now, and "released" his delegates to vote for the candidate of their choice. Of course, these delegates may decide to follow their original candidate and support Obama, and Edwards will of course be contacting them to urge them to support Obama. But until these delegates speak up and say who they will be supporting, they will essentially become uncommitted delegates. Which, essentially, makes them no different than superdelegates. (We'll keep them in the Edwards column for now).

So how many Edwards delegates are there? Four from New Hampshire, 8 from South Carolina, and 4 so far from Iowa. (The names are at the bottom of the post).

But wait. That's only 16. The DCW tracker shows Edwards with 19 delegates. Why the difference? It's because Edwards is projected by The Green Papers to get 3 state-wide delegates at the Iowa State Convention on June 14. But as we learned at the Iowa Congressional District Conventions in April, these delegate projections are only estimates. And it's difficult to see the Edwards forces holding together in June. (assuming the race is still going on then). So those final 3 delegates will likely get reassigned to other candidates, leaving Edwards with the 16 delegates described above.

But we're not done yet. Edwards also won 13 delegates in Florida, all at the CD level. (He won only 14.4% of the state-wide vote, so just fell short of getting any state-wide delegates - he would have picked up 9 or 10 delegates if he had hit 15%). Whether he keeps them depends on 1) whether the Florida delegates get seated at all, and 2) under what rules they get seated. That will have to wait for the RBC meeting at the end of the month.

Finally, when the history of this nomination battle is written, one question that's going to be asked is, did John Edwards leave the race too soon? While it's impossible to predict that things would have turned out the same way had Edwards stayed in longer, there's no doubt that if Edwards has stayed in, he would have likely won a sizable number of delegates on Super Tuesday. And if so, instead of his endorsement being mostly symbolic, he might have ended up the biggest kingmaker of all, basically getting to decide whether Clinton or Obama would get his support, his delegates, and therefore the nomination.

Politico gives us the names of the delegates from NH and SC:

New Hampshire:

District Level Delegate: Joshua Denton, (Portsmouth)
District Level Delegate: Deborah Bacon-Nelson (Hanover)
Pledged Leader Elected Official: Senator Peter Hoe Burling (Cornish)
At-large Delegate: Representative Sharon Nordgren (Hanover)

South Carolina:

Robert Groce
Marilyn Hemingway
E Tim Moore Barnwell
John Moylan
Lauren Bilton
Daniel Boan Kershaw
Michael Evatt