What if John Edwards won Iowa in 2008?

[White Trash]

Would he have been able to take the nomination? Would he be able to keep the affair under wraps during the general election?

[NHI]

If Edwards won Iowa, then Clinton would have won the nomination. The lack of an Obama Dynamic ensures a Clinton win.

[Devout Centrist]

Well his father would've gone back to work in that mill.

[CatoMinor]

Maybe if everything went right and Obama threw his support behind him and became the face of a change movement vs Hillary's establishment he could have won the nomination on a midwest-south coalition of working class whites, and southern minorities.

By the general however once the scandal came out McCain would have a cake walk.

[GoTfan]

Well assuming no scandal and Obama dropping out to throw his weight behind him, Edwards would've been decently positioned to be the lefty outsider that Sanders was this year.

[Pericles]

Hillary wins New Hampshire, Edwards doesn't do so well there. Then she follows it with a win in Nevada. Obama drops out, but that ensures she wins a landslide in South Carolina with big support from the black vote. For the killer, Edwards' affair is leaked by his campaign staff. He goes down in flames and Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. She has an extra-long general election campaign against John McCain. However when the economy goes down she is actually inevitable this time. She wins relatively comfortably, with her WWC appeal then she might win different states and McConnell could lose his Senate race. Hillarycare II passes. Similar in a lot of ways to the Obama presidency.

[RC (a la Frémont)]

His scandal kind of ruins his campaign, but if he won Iowa, Hillary would win subsequent states, making Obama and Edwards drop out. She would win the nomination. In the election, she would win by a decent margin. I think she could've won Montana and North Carolina but lose Indiana, I don't really know.

I'd like to think that she would've appointed Obama to SoS and he would be the one running in 2016, and Trump wouldn't run because he supported Hillary in '08. The map might've looked like this:

Secretary of State Barack Obama/Senator Tim Kaine - 273 Electoral Votes

Senator Ted Cruz/Busineusswoman Carly Fiorina - 247 Electoral Votes

Tossup - 18 Electoral Votes