John Edwards took a serious hit when he failed to garner the SEIU endorsement. Rather than a national endorsement, the union decided to give each local the power to make their own endorsements.
This means, most importantly, that the national SEIU's significant war chest and its campaign operatives are out of commission in this primary. It also means members of locals can only campaign out of their state in places where those locals have endorsed the same candidate.
So the Iowa local endorsed Edwards. Yeay Edwards! Except that Iowa's SEIU is small, with just 2,000 members. But neighboring Illinois has one of the biggest SEIU locals -- 100,000. Also nearby Indiana has another 70,000. Obama scored a coup by getting their endorsement. They're off the table for the Iowa battle.
What about New Hampshire? 10,000 members, and another 70,000 in neighboring Massachussets. But the regional mother lode is New York with 300,000 members. Edwards could sure use those guys and gals, but Hillary Clinton is the state's senator, and they're unlikely to piss off someone who might still be the state's senator after the primary. So she's the prohibitive favorite for the New York endorsement, again depriving Edwards of valuable boots on the ground and blunting the PR value of the endorsements he does get. Like:
The two biggest: California, which has 656,000 members and Washington State, which has 103,000 members.
Other states include: Michigan (70,000 members), Idaho (400 members), Montana (500 members), Minnesota (28,000 members), Ohio (22,000 members), West Virginia (4,000 members) and Oregon (46,000 members).
The Edwards campaign interprets the SEIU rules to allow these SEIU affiliates to help them turn out caucus goers in Iowa, although they are limited largely to making telephone calls.
"Limited largely to telephone calls", I gather, because those members are so far away, which raises the importance of members in states within driving distance.
SEIU New Hampshire is obviously important (and is getting wooed to death), but also important will be SEIU Massachusetts, with 75,000 members a couple of hours (at most) from New Hampshire. If a candidate can get both the Mass and New Hampshire locals, he or she should get a real boost. Otherwise, the other candidates will work to split the Massachussets local off.
Nice way for SEIU to inject some added drama to the race and make Edwards have to work that much harder for an endorsement that means less than would've been the case had the national put its weight behind his campaign as was widely expected.