by Evie Stone

Over at FiveThirtyEight, stats fiend Nate Silver throws some cold water on Howard Wolfson's suggestion that if Edwards had disapparated before the Iowa caucuses, HRC might have won Iowa and and rolled to the nomination. Silver says...unlikely:

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)