With Mitch Daniels officially out of the race, Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee now a distant after-thought, and Newt Gingrich’s campaign running on fumes, pundits of all political stripes are finding it hard to shake a persistent belief that there’s a gaping hole in the Republican presidential field. Indeed, the most frequent theme that keeps cropping up in smart analysis of the current state of play is that the contest cries out for a late-entering, credible southern candidate. The figure most often pointed to is Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the grounds that, well, southerners are especially inclined to vote for southerners, and no matter who wins Iowa or Nevada or New Hampshire, the real deal may go down in Dixie. But these analyses all suffer from the same flaw: They overestimate the pull of regional affinity and underestimate ideology. And while, in the past, significant regional differences existed when it came to ideological belief within the Republican Party, that era is sunsetting and, with it, so too are the built-in advantages of the southern Republican candidate. …

Until fairly recently, southern Republicans were ideologically distinct from GOPers in other regions, but that’s hardly the case now. If you did a blind test today of the messages of Republican candidates for president, you would not have much reason to assume that this candidate or that was from this place or that. For decades, southern Republicans have been known for hostility to the very idea of unions. That is now an increasingly entrenched national GOP position, as demonstrated by the agendas of Republican governors in Michigan and Ohio. Hard-core southern conservative litmus tests on abortion, same-sex marriage, federal civil rights efforts, energy policy, and welfare (defined as any measure that redistributes income to help the poor) are now also standard national GOP fare. So do southern Republicans still need a southerner to preach their gospel these days? Not really.