Edwards Moving Staff Out of Nevada

Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., speaks with the media before kicking off a bus tour in the parking lot of his Iowa campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Aug. 13, 2007. (AP Photo/Kevin Sanders) (Kevin Sanders - AP)

"Senator Reid is right, the road to the White House runs through Nevada," Richardson's statement said. "Though other campaigns may waver, I remain committed to campaigning in Nevada."

Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said the campaign had dozens of staffers in Nevada and plans to open new offices in the coming weeks.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the campaign had more than 30 aides in Nevada as of July and is continuing to add staff. The Obama campaign recently opened an office in rural Elko and began airing Spanish-language radio ads.

But Clinton and Obama also have more than $50 million to spend around the country. Edwards has raised $23 million, part of a $40 million goal that his campaign says will be enough to run in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He has declined to staff up in states that vote on the Feb. 5 super Tuesday primary day, banking that victories in the early states will create the momentum needed to win contests that come later.

The Edwards campaign wouldn't say how many staff would be left in Nevada, but said state director Bill Hyers will keep running the effort. At least one top staffer in the state, field director Preston Elliot, is not headed to another Edwards' effort but instead took a job with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

From the beginning, there have been questions about how seriously candidates would take Nevada and how hard they would work for the state's 22 base delegates. Nevada had only 17 caucus sites in 2004 _ one per county _ and just 8,500 of the state's nearly 1 million active registered voters took part. That was a huge jump from 2000, when fewer than 1,000 participated, and the increase overwhelmed the party and delayed results for hours.

This time, the party plans to have as many as 1,000 sites.

The Democratic candidates have been making the long trip to campaign in Nevada, but not as frequently as they have been visiting Iowa and New Hampshire.

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Associated Press writer Kathleen Hennessey in Las Vegas and Jim Davenport in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.

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