Reply #232: Your own article in the second link says he was ignored and that media

[AP]

focused on Gephardt and Dean, which is what I remember.

Edwards's campaign was connecting with people despite the media and not because of it.

The editorial was earned, but that's not the same thing as national media and NPR and all the other big media (who we presume had other interests besides reporting accurately about the candidates).

Also, Edwards's strength was a combinationo of his positions on the issues and his ability to relate those positions directly to voters. The media coverage on him, according to mediatenor.org ignored his position on the issues, and as you note, they never let him talk directly to voters. Had they let him communicate directly with voters, he obviously would have really connected. (This is also why he got less than half the time -- and sometimes one third -- that other candidates, including Clark, got to talk in several of the early debates).

The coverage of Edwards was limited to his personality, and although it was positive (what bad things can you say about his personality?) it was tiny compared to other candidates. In fact, I think Clark got more coverage in total than Edwards got, and Dean got more coverage than everyone else combined. Even when Dean got more bad coverage (in Dec, when he was still going up in the poll) Dean's good coverage was still greater than all the other candidates total coverage.

I'll also repeat: the media picking Edwards for VP was sort of like picking him NOT to be the presidential nominee. (If they liked him so much, why didn't they let him fight it out with Kerry for the top of the ticket, which they could have done if they talked more about his positions on the issues and if they stopped asking him if he was really running for VP, like Leno did).

Re NH: Edwards pulled everything out of NH and was ready to skip it and focus on SC before Jan 19 and had to reorganize after Iowa when they did so well. And during that week, while they were trying to allocate resources, the media only talked about the Dean scream, which denied Kerry and Edwards some of the juice they should have gotten from Iowa. NH was not a disappointement for Edwards. In fact, he doubled his poll numbers in the last three days -- and I believe he was the only candidate other than Kerry who went up in the polls that week, which they felt good about.

As for mini-Tuesday, I'll tell you that I had personal knowledge of how this played out. Edwards's campaign pulled out of Oklahoma with a week to go. They did not try to win it. That was one of the things the campaign kicked themselves about. They had conceded it to Clark and were very surprised by the results. In retrospect, they felt that if they had just kept a few more resources there, they could have won it by a respectable margin and it would have changed the mood subsequently. To them, and to the media who had observed their OK strategy, OK was encouraging news for Edwards and bad news for Clark. That's just the fact. That's not spin.

As for those other states, people don't care how you do in a state you don't campaign in, and everyone was fighting for SC. Edwards got 110,000 more votes there than Clark. In Missouri, he got 85,000 more votes than Clark. In SC, that was a lot of votes in a state they all wanted to win, and it was a significant % of the votes that were cast that day. (In ND, 10,000 votes were cast with Clark beating Edwards by 1,231 to 1,025 -- believe me, nobody is going to discount Edwards because of that result -- and didn't Clark even campaign there?).

Edwards was percieved as doing well on that day because he got a LOT of votes in states where all the candidates campaigned -- and again, it wasn't because of the media: Edwards saw the biggest increase in his poll numbers in the last three days of each primary: that's when the candidates get local media coverage, run their ads, and voters get a close look at what the candidates are saying, and not what the media is saying about them. That's what people in the party were seeing that they liked.