Herman Cain's announcement Saturday that he would suspend his run for the presidency left many metro-area Cain supporters disappointed, but accepting.
"I thought he was a great candidate and he had so many fabulous ideas. He was not a politician, he was a businessman," said Joan Virag, 70, of McDonough, a retired biochemistry researcher who had donated to Cain's campaign. "I appreciate the fact that he listened to his family and didn’t try to talk them out of it. I’m sure there has been a lot pain."
The pain stemmed from a series of charges, including sexual harassment and long-term marital infidelity, that ultimately halted Cain's run.
Most recently, Dunwoody businesswoman Ginger White said she and Cain had a 13-year extramarital affair. Cain has denied the claims, but his poll numbers dropped dramatically.
For some supporters, his reaction to the allegations proved more concerning than the allegations themselves.
"What is that saying? It’s not the deed that does you in, it is the denial or the cover up," said Debbie Dooley, 53, of Dacula, a systems analyst and co-founder of Atlanta Tea Party.
Though Dooley never endorsed Cain, she did defend him against the initial sexual harassment allegations. But that was when some people began moving away from Cain, she said.
"Since the sexual harassment allegations first surfaced with Mr. Cain, it wasn't the adultery accusation that bothered people, it was the way everything was completely bungled," she said. "A lot of people at that point began shifting their focus to Newt [Gingrich], and the polls bear that out."
Dooley was particularly bothered by the Ginger White charges, and the fact that Cain's wife, Gloria, seemed to know nothing about the relationship that Cain was adamantly denying.
"I was glad to hear him say in his speech that he made mistakes," Dooley said. " I think the world of him, I was just bothered by the way all the allegations were handled."
Still, she said, Cain's truncated run has had a strong impact on the political landscape.
"Had he not been in the race, I think the Republican field would have been more or less in the middle instead of to the right as they are now and they would not have been talking about tax reform," Dooley said. Now, she said, the GOP party as a whole can focus on those important issues.
Cain's withdrawal will force many of his supporters to put their time and money behind a new candidate -- and some have already decided it's Gingrich.
Louis Lucero, 76, of Waleska and his wife, Jean, had been supporters of Cain, contributing part of their earnings as retired military to his campaign.
Though they still aren't sure what to think about all the allegations that beset Cain's presidential run, they are pretty clear on the next move.
"We will probably just go to the other guy from Atlanta," Lucero said, referring to Gingrich, a former U.S. congressman from Georgia. "We’ll support him. That is about the only thing...that would [go up] against Obama."
But Julianne Thompson, a Suwanee mother of two and state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said it would be unwise to assume all of Cain's supporters will throw their weight behind Gingrich.
"I think that people are going to need a little while to digest this and move on," Thompson said. But "I don’t think you are going to see everyone from Herman's campaign flocking to one specific campaign."
Some former Cain supporters will surely support Gingrich, she said, but she also predicted a potential rise in the poll numbers of Rick Santorum, particularly among party members strongly committed to social issues.
"This presidential campaign has been a nail-biter," Thompson said, recalling the ups and downs of the 2007 race in which Rudy Giuliani came out of the gate strong, but ultimately yielded last-man-standing spots to John McCain and Mike Huckabee.
McCain and Huckabee were very different, she said, but they both ran clean campaigns and ran on the issues.
"In 2011, people are even smarter politically than they were in 2007 and 2008," Thompson said. "They want to talk about the issues and who has the answers to turning American around and who has the answers to what our children will be facing in the future in this country."
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