Nathalie Dupree Launches Longshot Senate Bid in South Carolina

From Southern Political Report
By Tom Baxter

The U.S. Senate race in South Carolina got a new flavor Thursday when cookbook author Nathalie Dupree announced she is running as a write-in candidate against Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.

“I’m a long-shot candidate, yes, but I’ve been in the homes of hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians over the years through my cooking shows and books. I know you, you know me, and you know I mean business when I tackle anything. It’s time to cook some goose, and the goose is Jim DeMint,” Dupree said in an announcement statement.

Dupree spoke Thursday afternoon on the State House steps in Columbia and in front of the Pineapple statue at Waterford Park in Charleston.

Dupree’s late entrance is a sign of frustration among many Democrats in South Carolina about this race, which eroded from an easy jog for DeMint to a national curiosity when Alvin Greene, an obscure candidate with no political record, won the Democratic primary.

DeMint has stirred more controversy within his own caucus lately than he has at home, and leads the most recent Rasmussen poll of the race by more than 40 percentage points.

Dupree’s husband, Jack Bass, is a historian who has written two biographies of Strom Thurmond, who became the only write-in candidate to win a U.S. Senate seat in 1954.

She noted that while Thurmond voted against many spending bills, “he made darn sure that South Carolina got every dollar available for programs needed for our state.”

Demint’s “stubborn refusal and condemnation of earmarks” is threatening the state’s economic development, she said.

“Every coastal state in our nation is receiving earmarks from the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a study required before their major port can be deepened as needed for the larger ships that in 2014 will be crossing an expanded Panama Canal. Except South Carolina,” Dupree said.

Dupree, who lives in Charleston, has owned restaurants and a cooking school, had a cooking show and is the author of 10 cookbooks.