With Richardson’s goodbye, where will his supporters go?
Assuming he’s departing, it’s the inevitable question. His supporters represent more than practically everone under 4th place combined.
Kevin Drum makes a case they’ll go to Hillary. In Iowa, however, precinct organizers claimed they were working with Obama, though the national campaign denied it.
Some accounts say he’ll suspend his active campaigning without officially dropping out. That would permit him to avoid any endorsement decision and still permit him some opportunities for sideline commentary designed to influence topics under debate.
I think that would be his smartest move. Ultimately, though, most of his supporters in upcoming states will still gravitate to others. If he was polling at 8% nationally, I’d expect 2% to stay with him and most of the other 6% to gravitate to the top two.
Bottom line: everyone can guess, nobody knows, speculation is not news and the race for the nomination will turn on the performance of the candidates. Nobody in the top three is departing before Super Tuesday and - I hope - all will stay in through mid-February.
Economic uncertainty in the next 5 weeks is going to get incredibly high. Obama first and now Hillary, are starting to adopt Edwards’ populist rhetoric and by mid-February, if voters can’t figure out who the real populist is, that’s when he’ll likely be forced to fold his tent. If I were advising the Edwards campaign, I’d be going on the attack against Big Oil and pose the question whether Bush will advance aggression against Iran solely to give his oil cronies one more quarter of windfall profits at the expense of American consumers.
His attacks on big corporations has been too vague. It’s time to narrow that list to recognizable culprits if his populism’s going to lengthen his legs.
