As former North Carolina Senator John Edwards announced his intention to remove his name from the ever-shrinking pool of candidates running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, he laid out what his campaign was about and what he expected of his two main opponents, New York Senator, Hillary Clinton, and Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Edwards, always seen as a strong supporter of organized labor and an even stronger champion of those in poverty, made a call for the Democratic Party to not forget about the voiceless:

[Edwards]: "For decades, we stopped focusing on those struggles: they didn't register in political polls; they didn't get us votes; and so we stopped talking about it. I don't know how it started. I don’t know when our party began to turn away from the cause of working people. From the fathers who were working three jobs literally just to pay the rent. Mothers sending their kids to bed wrapped up in clothes and coats because they couldn’t afford to pay for heat. We know that our brothers and sisters have been bullied into believing that they can’t organize and that they can’t put a union in a workplace. Well, in this campaign we didn’t turn our heads; we looked them square in the eye and we said, 'we see you, we hear you, and we are with you, and we will never forget you.'"