UPDATED: Edwards wins SEIU NH Endorsement!

Edwards has won the New Hampshire SEIU endorsement according to MSNBC First Read.

After weeks of intense lobbying by the top three Democratic presidential candidates, Edwards has come away with the endorsement of the New Hampshire SEIU.

The endorsement will help Edwards considerably, providing him with financial resources and volunteers in the Granite state. It will also prevent other state chapters from sending volunteers to New Hampshire to campaign for either Obama or Clinton.

This is the 12th state SEIU endorsement Edwards has won; the others include Iowa and California.

Wow! So that's several key endorsements in some very key states. He now has SEIU worker power locked up in both Iowa and New Hampshire, as well California and 9 other states. This should be very helpful going into the early caucuses and primaries.

Here's a video from October 15th, when he won the endorsement of the SEIU in 10 of those states.



And here was the news from that day:

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) state councils from Iowa, California, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, West Virginia, Ohio and Oregon announced they have endorsed Senator John Edwards for president, totaling close to one million SEIU members.
Representatives from several of the ten state councils joined Edwards for a press conference at the Eckstein Medical Research Building in Iowa City. The endorsements will allow these SEIU state councils, which collectively represent over 930,000 members, to organize efforts to turn out caucus goers on Edwards' behalf within Iowa, and in any other state where the SEIU state councils have also endorsed Edwards. SEIU state councils across the country will be determining their endorsement decisions in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: I was reminded, thanks to the comments at Daily Kos, that this means 90,000 SEIU members from neighboring Massachusetts, where SEIU has also endorsed Edwards, can come to New Hampshire to help out.

The news from Oct. 18th:

The Massachusetts council of the Service Employees International Union on Thursday joined 10 other state chapters endorsing Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

The council, which represents 90,000 workers in Massachusetts, cited Edwards' record on health care.

Also, I really should have included this video of John Edwards' closing remarks at the SEIU convention in Washington, DC in the original post.



UPDATED 2nd time:

I want to thank okamichan13 for pointing out the wise words of kos.

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.

I posted this earlier on Daily Kos.