Is there a CSS selector for text nodes?

Question

Text nodes cannot have margins or any other style applied to them, so anything you need style applied to must be in an element. If you want some of the text inside of your element to be styled differently, wrap it in a span or div, for example.

You cannot target text nodes with CSS. I'm with you; I wish you could... but you can't :(

If you don't wrap the text node in a <span> like @Jacob suggests, you could instead give the surrounding element padding as opposed to margin:

HTML

<p id="theParagraph">The text node!</p>

CSS

p#theParagraph
{
    border: 1px solid red;
    padding-bottom: 10px;
}