Nathalie Dupree, a prominent Charleston chef and author whose numerous cookbooks have sold more than a half-million copies, unexpectedly entered South Carolina’s lopsided U.S. Senate race as a write-in candidate on Thursday.
In challenging heavily-favored Republican Senator Jim DeMint, the 70-year-old Dupree told the New York Times that she hopes to raise $60,000 to $100,000 for her uphill campaign.
“I have one goal in this campaign: to cook Jim DeMint‘s goose,” she wrote on her campaign web site.
“First I’ll have to find him, which means searching for him — in Delaware or Alaska, or Florida, or Ohio, or Nevada, or maybe I’ll find him in Arizona,” quipped Dupree, who has been highly critical of DeMint’s role in supporting insurgent tea party candidates around the country while ignoring the plight of South Carolinians.
Dupree is arguably the best known of DeMint’s five challengers, a field that includes Alvin Greene, the unemployed Manning resident who stunned South Carolina’s political establishment by capturing the Democratic nomination, and the Green Party’s Tom Clements, a 59-year-old environmentalist who’s been making serious inroads among traditional Democratic voters embarrassed by Greene’s candidacy.
Two other write-in candidates — high school teacher Greg Snoad of Mauldin and longtime activist Mazie Ferguson of Sumter — are also in the hunt.
Polls show DeMint leading Greene, who has been largely shunned by his own party, by a roughly three-to-one margin.
Dupree’s eleventh-hour write-in candidacy is unlikely to change the dynamics of the race. She’s given little chance of success, said political science professor J. David Gillespie, author of Politics at the Periphery: Third Parties in Two-Party America and the forthcoming Challenging America’s Duopoly.
“Obviously, the quick answer is it’s not going to happen,” Gillespie told the Charleston Post and Courier.
In declaring her candidacy, Dupree became the second nationally-recognized chef to mount a seemingly improbable write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate this fall.
Ina Pinkney, the chef-owner of Ina’s restaurant in Chicago, announced her write-in candidacy for the remainder of Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat last month. The seat is currently occupied by Senator Roland Burris, whose term ends on November 2. The eight-week term being sought by Pinkney will begin right after the election and run through January 2, 2011.
Unlike Dupree, Pinkney refuses to accept campaign contributions. She’s running, she said, because she’s tired of millionaires sending other millionaires to the U.S. Senate.
Pinkney, who announced her candidacy in her restaurant’s monthly newsletter, said that her campaign will be conducted entirely by word-of-mouth.
No stranger to write-in campaigns, the rabble-rousing Breakfast Queen ran for mayor of Chicago in 2007, polling 2,302 votes.
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