The politicians have broken for Thanksgiving. Congress has gone home. The president is back in the United States. The Democratic candidates have actually left New Hampshire to its ancient seasonal rituals, most of which involve eating vast amounts of food and setting out on crisp midafternoon walks on paths made slippery by fallen leaves. It is a time for reflection.

Most of that reflection involves the bounty of gifts that so many Americans have at this season, even though economic distress lingers, even though many young Americans are in danger abroad, even though the landscape of American civic life has been flooded with a river of cynicism and partisanship.

Americans take Thanksgiving seriously, and have much for which to be thankful — and reflective.

Politicians often use the Thanksgiving weekend to ask themselves, and their families, the tough questions — and to recognize the unavoidable, often unpleasant, truths. It’s over Thanksgiving that politicians often decide to run for president — or to abandon the quest. For that reason, one wonders just what wisdom will be passed with the cranberry sauce in John Kerry’s household, and at John Edwards’ house, and maybe, too, in the place where Joe Lieberman lives.

One of the truths that will emerge for anyone taking a sober look at American politics this weekend is startling in its implications: The country has two parties, but increasingly only one of them is a true national party. The Republicans’ influence in the South is growing so swiftly that, a year from now, we might conclude that the Democrats have all but disappeared from a region that they once regarded as their own “Solid South.”

To be sure, the last three Democratic presidents have been Southerners (four of the last five, if you stretch and consider Missouri a Southern state).

But right now it’s possible that state and local Democratic officeholders — the last redoubt of the Democrats in the region — may actually beg the party’s nominee not to campaign in their states in next fall’s general election. In short, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont can’t expect much of a color guard next autumn if he prevails in the Boston convention and then dares decamp in the Old Confederacy whose flag caused him so much trouble this autumn.

The Democrats did win the Louisiana governor’s office this month when Kathleen Babineaux Blanco became the first woman elected to the state’s highest office. But the Republicans ousted Democratic governors in off-year elections this month in Kentucky and Mississippi — and in Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama a year ago. Today there are also Republican governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas. That’s a big change from the old days; in the 1924 election, a big year for the GOP, incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge won only 1,123 votes in the entire state of South Carolina.

Today most high schools have more people.

Meanwhile, four prominent Democrats will not be seeking re-election to the Senate from Southern states. The departures of Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Zell Miller of Georgia, Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida make the Republicans’ hold on the chamber look even tighter. The Democrats have high hopes in South Carolina, where Inez Tenenbaum, the popular state superintendent of education, will face no primary opposition and may win the support of substantial numbers of Republican women. Even so, they know that their efforts in Georgia will be hampered by the possibility that Miller, who has endorsed the president for re-election, may campaign for Bush in the state.

New poll data prepared by the Pew Research Center shows that the South is by far the strongest region for President Bush as he prepares for re-election. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Republicans have made party-identification gains of 6 percentage points or more in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee. In Arkansas, the GOP identification gain is 15 percentage points. (It’s the best evidence yet that, in Arkansas at least, the Clinton era is history.) Among Hispanics, the fastest-growing voter group, the Republicans trimmed the Democratic advantage in the South in the past six years from 15 percentage points to 8.

Now to the statistic that Merle Black, the Emory University expert on Southern politics, believes is the most telling: Interviews with voters in the 2002 midterm congressional elections showed that more Southern voters considered themselves to be Republicans than to be Democrats, and they did so by a 44 percent to 36 percent margin. (Among white voters, 53 percent identified themselves with the GOP.)

“This is driving the politics,” says Black. “It’s harder and harder for Democrats to put together a biracial coalition. Across the region they need about 40 percent of the white vote, and it’s just not there. Now they’ve got to do something they haven’t had to do as much — go after the white independents. And they are slipping away.”

President Bush begins the 2004 campaign with a far more solid base in the South than he had in 2000; the region likes Bush and wants him to succeed.

Unless the Democrats nominate Edwards for president (or give him the vice-presidential nomination) — and thus make North Carolina competitive next fall — the Republicans could sweep every state in the South but one. The outlier is Florida, which almost every analyst agrees will be a battleground again in 2004. Bush’s brother Jeb occupies the governor’s chair in Tallahassee, but the Democrats could win the state next year — and may well do so if Sen. Graham is put on the party’s ticket to stoke resentments about Florida’s role in the last election.

It’s the season for reflecting and giving thanks. This week there’s a lot to reflect on if you’re a Democrat, lots to be thankful for if you’re a Republican.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.