Survey USA has performed a series of surveys of how the various combinations of president-VP candidates performs relative to each other in a series of states. In all of them, the best performing pair for the Democrats is Obama/Edwards, beating McCain+anyone by huge margins. Admittedly Edwards has name recognition that the others lack, so things would certainly change over time, but the numbers are stunning. And this hard data certainly contradicts the "conventional wisdom" that John Edwards didn't help last time.
It was also a bit amazing how much the VP slot mattered in the results. In many of these states, Edwards gave a 15 point advantage to Obama, flipping losses into victories.
I'll admit that I'm a big Edwards fan, but these numbers are stunning!
The site won't let me embed the graphics directly, so click on each one to view them (sorry):
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Wonder why they didn't ask about Clinton as VP - that would have been interesting reading.
Go to http://www.surveyusa.com/ for the full data, cross-tabs, etc.