cos

It seems highly unlikely that that disagreement had anything to do with their relative popularity. It's a debate that mostly erupted after Obama had effectively already won, but people still believed it was an open contest. They were expressing such similar positions on most issues, that small disagreements on details like this were expanded into major debate issues, but these disagreements on details were highly unlikely to matter because by that point, the people who actually understood and cared about such details had long figured out who they were supporting - and the final outcome of the primaries was already decided anyway.

I googled and found something about Obama explaining why he had changed his mind on the individual mandate, so that is probably why I got it backward: I remembered that it was a subject of debate back in March/April/May last year, and knew that he proposed an individual mandate when he asked Congress for health care reform legislation this year, so that got me to think he'd favored it, since I didn't notice him talking about changing his mind about it. But that also suggests how unimportant it was as an issue in making up my mind about the candidates; Obama's overall outline for health care reform is mainly John Edwards' plan anyway, and that was the best one of the three of them during the primaries.