Abstract:
2008’s Democratic Presidential Primary will go down as one of the most competitive
races in recent history. Two candidates, Senators Barack Obama (Illinois) and Hillary
Clinton (New York), fought a see-saw battle to obtain enough delegates/vote-shares for
the Democratic nomination. Although the race eventually dwelled down to these two
players, for a while it was a dynamic three-player-race with Senator John Edwards (North
Carolina) in the fold. During that time, many people were puzzled by Edwards’ insisting
on staying in the race even when he had no foreseeable chance of becoming the party’s
eventual nominee. In this honors thesis, I construct a theoretical model to explain
Edwards’ reason for staying in the race. My model found that if Edwards attains a certain
amount of vote-shares, depending on the external circumstances, he could have pushed
the election into a backroom negotiation phase. In this phase, he would have become the
most pivotal player as his relatively low amount of vote-shares would ironically turn him
into the player with the greatest negotiating power. This could have allowed him to come
out of the backroom negotiation with a final prize value that would have exceeded the
efforts he inputted. My paper coins this as “The Edwards Effect” and explores the
ramifications and conditions for its existence.
