Thompson throws in the towel

Thompson quits presidential race

"Today, I have withdrawn my candidacy for president of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort," the former Tennessee senator said in a brief statement.
Thompson's fate was sealed last Saturday in the South Carolina primary, when he finished third in a state that he had said he needed to win.

So that leaves Huckabee and Paul for the Republicans and Edwards for the Democrats as the only Southern candidates left in the race. (Although some might consider Hillary Clinton an honorary Southerner.)

If the eventual nominees aren't from the South, how will they balance their tickets and fine tune their message to appeal to Southern voters? And don't think they aren't thinking about it.

From this Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

It has been in vogue throughout the Bush years for Democrats to assert that the South is unredeemable and politically unnecessary. I remember seeing Kerry speak at Dartmouth College in the days before the 2004 New Hampshire primary, when he flatly told the audience that a Democratic nominee could win the presidency without worrying about the South. [..] In “Whistling Past Dixie,” Schaller marshaled a pile of statistics to argue, essentially, that the region’s long legacy of prejudice left it hopelessly blind to the nobility of the Democratic cause.

[..] Other Democrats, like Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, short-lived presidential hopeful and now Senate candidate, have argued that if the party aspires to build a real governing majority like the one it enjoyed for much of the 20th century, it will have to at least compete seriously in the South. [..] What’s more, as some of the sharper Democratic strategists have realized, reaching voters down South isn’t only about the South. Culturally and ideologically, there isn’t much that separates most Southern, independent white voters from those who live in exurban Ohio or in rural Missouri.

Read the whole thing for some interesting thoughts on the New South as a testing ground for candidates and strategies that will work in swing states all across America.

Labels: Election 2008, politics