Why Howard Wolfson is Out of a Job

Nate Silver does a thorough job of illustrating just how faulty Howard Wolfson's reasoning ability is.

Iowa actually didn't turn out to be that close, with Obama defeating Edwards by 7.9 points and Hillary Clinton by 8.1 points. For Clinton to have beaten Obama, she would have needed (as Wolfson correctly points out) about two-thirds of those Edwards voters.

The thing about Iowa, however, is that unlike virtually any other electoral contest, second choices matter, since Democratic caucus rules dictate that a voter may caucus for her second-choice candidate if her first choice does not achieve the 15 percent of the vote required for viability. As such, Iowa pollsters did a lot of work in trying to determine voters' second choices. And in virtually every survey, Clinton did rather poorly as a second choice: an average of several surveys in December showed that she was the second choice of about 20 percent of voters, as compared with 25 percent for Obama and Edwards (an even later version I have sitting on my hard drive showed the second-choice breakdown as Edwards 30, Obama 28.5, Clinton 23.5)

So the odds are that, if John Edwards had dropped out on the morning before the Iowa caucus, Obama would have won by more points rather than fewer.