America - Andrew Stephen forecasts a struggle for Nader

Here, first, is another of my predictions: unless John Kerry can pull himself together and run a decent campaign in the next few days, Senator John Edwards will surge and may even win states on Super Tuesday, 2 March. He could amaze the pundits by clinching states such as Georgia, Minnesota and Ohio - still leaving Kerry with considerably more delegates to vote for him at this summer's Democratic convention, but giving Kerry the serious fright I suspect he needs in order to refocus his campaign. In those three states I mention, Republicans and independents are allowed to vote in Democratic primaries - and they are just the sort of voters whom exit polls show Edwards to be picking up.

What can safely be said is that one of these two men will now have to contend with the candidacy of Ralph Nader, 70 on 27 February, in this year's election. Nader would fit comfortably into the Labour Party, but in the current American climate the veteran consumer-rights champion is far, far to the left. He won 2.7 per cent of the national vote in 2000 when he stood as a Green Party candidate - this year he will run as an independent - and his 97,488 votes in Florida alone certainly denied Al Gore the presidency (Gore lost to Bush in Florida by 537 votes). In New Hampshire, Bush won by 7,211 votes, while Nader garnered 22,198. Nader himself now says unconvincingly that he will take away more votes from Republicans and independents than from the Democrats, but few believe this; Democrats have been lobbying Nader not to run, and a ralphdontrun.net website has sprung up.

It will be more of an uphill target for Nader than it was in 2000, however. He will need roughly a million and a half signatures to get on all the ballots in the country; his first priority is the heavily Republican Texas of Dubbya, where he will need 65,000 signatures by 13 May. In California he will need something like 150,000 signatures. He will not be eligible for about $18.6m in government funding for the primaries, and because he failed to win 5 per cent of the votes last time around he will also not receive any government funding for the presidential election after this year's party conventions. And for Nader - who arguably is single-handedly responsible for making seat belts and airbags mandatory in cars and who can also claim credit for the Freedom of Information Act 1966, the Clean Air Act 1970 and the Environmental Protection Agency - there are further obstacles ahead.

First, Democrats are likely to be more aware of the dangers this time - that a vote for Nader could have the effect, hitherto seen as unlikely, of putting Boy George back into the White House for another four years. Second, the right-wing Bush administration has seen to it that the differences between the parties are more pronounced than they seemed to be in 2000. Indeed, Nader insists he will attack Bush so much that the Democrats will steal his anti-Bush ammunition for their own campaigning. But I haven't yet found a Democrat who thinks Nader is anything other than a spoiler for them.

The exit poll figures of 2000 show that 45 per cent of the votes for Nader would otherwise have gone to Gore (easily giving him the presidency) - and 27 per cent to Bush (a surprisingly high figure). The statistics are so telling that Howard Dean appealed to all Democrats not to vote for Nader. But, insists Nader, the Democrats should "relax. Rejoice that you have another front."

Boy George, meanwhile, went on the offensive against the Democrats on Monday night - forced by the attacks of Kerry and Edwards to do so a month earlier than planned. He had one genuinely devastating soundbite against Kerry: "The candidates are an interesting group, with diverse opinions," he told Republican governors (including Arnie). "For tax cuts and against them. For Nafta [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and against Nafta; for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act; in favour of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts [Kerry]."

We can expect much more of the same until the party conventions: the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign has $104.4m in the bank saved for the purpose of attack ads in the coming weeks and months. Edwards, meanwhile, has just $118,497 in the bank.

The winning Democrat, who will be crowned at the Democratic convention in Boston at the end of July, needs a simple majority of 2,162 delegates (out of 4,322 in total), and usually wins most of these in the primaries; on Super Tuesday, 1,151 delegates are at stake. Because nearly all states allocate delegates in proportion to their overall votes, possible strong second-place showings by Kerry against Edwards will still gather him delegates, but it will require a real implosion of Kerry's campaign to allow Edwards even a glimpse of victory in the race. However, Edwards remains relentlessly upbeat and on the ball with audiences, while Kerry comes across these days as plodding - CBS asked him to re-record a soundbite because the one he had given them was too long and rambling.

There are actually precious few policy differences between them: Edwards is trying to drive a wedge between them on trade, saying he had been opposed to Nafta when it was passed by the Senate in 1993 (while Kerry points out that Edwards was conveniently not yet in the Senate at the time). Edwards is using as the main plank of his campaign the issue of jobs lost under the Bush administration, emphasising his humble origins as the son of a millworker; Kerry is doing the same with his service in Vietnam, which has become so repetitive that it could start to rebound on him.

Humble though Edwards's origins may be, he is now worth roughly $25m from his hugely successful law practice (mainly trying medical malpractice cases). This, indeed, is a Democratic election where all three candidates are multimillionaires: Nader, a lifelong bachelor who has a frugal lifestyle, is thought to have salted away millions from canny investments. Kerry - notwithstanding his wife's mega-wealth - is wealthy in his own right, coming from a Boston Brahmin family that spent its summers in France, making Kerry a fluent French-speaker. Indeed, Kerry plays down his own privileged background. For two years he attended the prestigious St Albans School in Washington - which he never mentions. He went on, via St Paul's School in New Hampshire, to Yale where, like Boy George, he became a member of the creepy, secret Skull and Bones fraternity - which supposedly binds its small number of members (15 recruits a year) to a kind of privileged, networking microcosm of freemasonry that lasts a lifetime. Assuming that the Democrats choose Kerry, will he and Bush allow each other any secret concessions dating from their Skull and Bones pledges to other members?

I wouldn't put it past either of them. But back to Super Tuesday. All the polls predict that Kerry should win every state easily: he has a lot more money in the bank, has been campaigning in all ten states while Edwards has confined himself to six, and now has the backing of the AFL-CIO, the American labour federation, representing 13 million trade unionists. But he also suffers the handicap of having had 32 years in public life - of votes and speeches that give the Republicans the chance to scour his record for contradictions and embarrassments; Edwards was elected senator only in 1998, leaving him with little but his smiley face and his ability to sway audiences the way he used to sway juries.