Since I (somewhat arbitrarily) declared for John Edwards a few days ago, I’ve been following his press release feed.

What fascinates us Brits about the US elections is that they’re sort of the same as here, but at the same time, completely different.

I’ve been struck in reading his press releases that his campaign is almost entirely about the middle class. And unashamedly and expressly so. His latest PR is “Edwards brings fight for the middle class to Missouri.” It’s so far away from anything you’d hear in politics here as to sound almost comical to British ears. Although much of the campaigning we do will probably be beneficial to middle class Britons, we’d never sell it that way. Our campaigns are about ending poverty, reforming taxation to be fairer on the worst off, improving health care for all, fixing the environment, and so on, but “for the middle class”?

A convoluted route also ended up with me on Eric Lee’s blog. He seems – currently at least – to be an pro-Edwards attack blog, but makes some salient points: the narrative of the Dem race is entirely Hilary v Barack, with pore ol John not getting much of a look in in the press. We’re not hearing much of him this side of the Atlantic either.

Whilst now it looks as if his days are numbered, before Nevada, he was very much still in the race: as Lee said (writing on the 11th Jan):

If you didn’t know better, you’d think that either Clinton or Obama would have opened a massive lead by now, with Edwards trailing a distant third. To win the nomination, a candidate needs the support of 2,209 delegates.

The actual delegate count today is as follows: Obama – 25; Clinton – 24; Edwards – 19.

In other words, each candidate has so far won about 1% of the delegates they need to win. It is a three-way tie, so far.

Polls also suggested that Edwards would not do disastrously in the Silver State; an American Research Group poll of 14 Jan put Clinton / Obama / Edwards on 35/32/25 – definitely behind, but still in the race.

Then a local paper gave new figures of 32 / 30/ 27 and it looked like John was closely in the running.  The candidates were separated by less than the margin of error. Eric Lee gleefully told us that it looked like Edwards was about to triple his score in the state – in 2004 he polled 10%.

But when the votes were counted, a very different result emerged, leaving 10% a golden memory of a former high. With an embarrassing 4% of state delegates, Edwards doesn’t take a single national delegate from Nevada to the Convention – assuming he even makes it that far.

Now the recriminations start: the “Open thread” for the caucuses starts upbeat and gets more depressed as time passes.  First they blame the voting system, calling for a primary to replace the caucus and wondering if the system of “at large” caucuses is skewing the result.  Then they move onto wondering if it’s the candidate after all.

If Edwards waited one or two years before building his massive house, and did not work for the hedge fund (which was crazy !!) this would all be so different.  He could have stuck to his populist / anti-poverty message and wrapped up Iowa, gained the majority of support from unions after that and had all the momentum.  Instead, he needed to become the anti-lobbyist (and sometimes angry) candidate who uses a ‘media bias’ seige mentality.  I cannot understand if you are going to give up 4 years to run for president, which basically he did, why he would jeopardise it ?  Surely his other house was okay for a while ? and the money wont make much difference ?  Doesnt make sense.  What is happening now is a direct result of what followed from those mistakes.  He had a one in two chance of being president… now make that one in twenty.

But it’s not over yet, and the “Thank you” post on the Edwards blog is already starting to attract comments from team members determined to fight on in South Carolina.  This is close to home turf for the former Senator for North Carolina and he has a lot of ground to recapture.