ice President Al Gore was deserted last night by his home state of Tennessee and virtually the rest of his native South as he struggled to find a winning number of electoral votes elsewhere in the country.
His biggest hope for the region, Florida, was not safely in his camp early today, despite earlier projections. Gore had counted on those 25 precious electoral votes to offset disappointing returns elsewhere and throw Texas Governor George W. Bush's national strategy off balance.
Bush was poised to lead a Republican march through Dixie by claiming his home state - the greatest prize in the area with 32 votes in the electoral college - and nine other states from the old Confederacy that account for another 90 electoral votes.
Bush won easily, as expected, in most of the states that once constituted the ''Solid South,'' a reliably Democratic preserve until the party became identified with the civil rights movement and white voters defected to the GOP.
Because of Florida's conservative reputation and the fact that the Republican candidate's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor, the state had been considered a linchpin in a nationwide coalition for Bush.
Yet Gore had his eye on the state all along.
Though expending little effort in Florida in 1992, the Democrats lost the state by less than 2 percentage points. As a result, President Clinton developed ''this obsession to win Florida,'' said Mickey Kantor, one of Clinton's closest political associates. The Clinton-Gore ticket carried the state in 1996, and the experience encouraged Gore to fight for Florida again.
Gore's intentions were clear as early as last March, according to one prominent Democratic adviser, when the vice president broke with the Clinton administration by opposing federal intervention in the Elian Gonzalez case.
That ploy failed to gain much support in the Cuban-American community in Miami, which tends to be strongly Republican. But Gore struck a responsive chord with the state's large Jewish population with his selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate.
Gore's advocacy of extending Medicare coverage to prescription drugs, coupled with his promise to strengthen the Social Security system, was believed to have been especially influential in attracting the votes of tens of thousands of seniors living in retirement in Florida.
Across the rest of the region, Bush rolled up big margins in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and held leads in early counting in North Carolina and Louisiana.
Bush's conservative agenda was obviously popular in a region that has trended Republican since Barry Goldwater's candidacy in 1964, departing from the GOP line only to support Southern Democrats Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Though it is rare for a candidate to lose his home state, Gore's failure in Tennessee was not astonishing. The Democratic nominee had campaigned vigorously in the state in the past week to try to salvage its 11 votes, but his aides said he had always been at a disadvantage there because of his stand on such issues as gay rights, abortion rights, gun control, and tobacco.
Just as Gore targeted Florida, Bush put Tennessee in his crosshairs for a number of reasons.
Tennessee has a longer Republican history than other Southern states. The GOP has been strong in parts of east Tennessee since the Civil War, and the state now has a Republican governor as well as two US senators.
Bush campaigned in the state several times in recent weeks, portraying Gore as a son of the District of Columbia rather than a Tennesseean.
Recognizing the futility of competing in most of the Southern states, where a powerful strain of religious fundamentalism runs through the body politic, Gore felt his best chance outside of Florida and Tennessee lay in Arkansas.
