This is Crittenden, Kentucky, a Bible-belt hamlet where the sale of alcohol is banned. Yet it is not completely stuck in a prohibition era time-warp. People drink; they just have to travel outside county lines to find it. They marry, but they also get divorced. They are anti-abortion, but will rally around a girl who gets pregnant. They believe marriage is between a man and a woman, but have gay friends and relatives. They worry about the war because they know soldiers who are fighting in Iraq.

Overwhelmingly they backed George W Bush for president. It is in these heartlands that Karl Rove — "the architect", as Bush called his aide admiringly in his victory speech — laid the ground for the Republicans' electoral success. While the popular vote split 51%-48%, the broader picture shows that Bush won convincingly across the American suburbs and rural areas, pushing the Democrats out of the south and midwest and into their coastal, urban strongholds.

When John Kerry gracefully conceded defeat in the grand surroundings of Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, he told supporters: "I wish, you don't know how much, I could have brought this race home for you." As he relives what might have been, he may well wonder whether he was out of step with the hopes and dreams of America's hinterland.

CRITTENDEN is no more than a mile long and yet it spans Middle America. Here people aspire to moral values, but don't always live up to them. They regard Bush as an all-American family man who overcame his character flaws and drink problems, worked to forge a happy marriage with an admirable stay-at-home wife and brought up two flighty girls who are good at heart.

In Bush they see themselves, not the warmonger with an east coast, Ivy League pedigree satirised by the left. Marita Lawrence, 47, a local hairdresser, said she would "love to sit down in the same room" with Bush and talk. "At least he's been honest about his problems. If you 'fess up to them, they shouldn't be held against you."

She feels she knows, because she has been through a lot herself. "I'm a divorced single mother. It's been a hard struggle and I haven't had a lot of help. I've had to scratch around. But just because I'm divorced doesn't mean I'm a horrible person and I don't have any values."

The emergence of a solid block of Republican red states across the map has come as a shock to Kerry supporters. "We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is," wrote one self-described "depressed" commentator in The New York Times. Polls showing that moral values were the number one issue for 22% of voters — topping concerns about the economy, terrorism and the war in Iraq — have jolted those who confidently expected the high turnout to yield a Kerry presidency. Eighty per cent of "moral issues" voters cast their ballot for Bush, a sleeper trend that most pundits missed.

In bewilderment, liberals have blamed Bush's victory on "God, guns and gays". It is a consoling slogan with a dose of truth it in. Lawrence, for instance, doesn't go to church, but she was raised a Christian and has no truck with the theory of evolution: "I believe in the greater being and that God created man." She is licensed to carry a concealed weapon and owns a 9mm pistol. "I have to protect myself. I'm a single mother," she explained. And she is against abortion: "I believe every little thing deserves a chance."

Yet it is not the full picture. Lawrence and her friends lead far more complicated lives than the coastal elites wringing their hands over Kerry's defeat can imagine. By writing off its opponents as Bible-thumping bigots, the left could fulfil its own worst fears and deliver the Republicans a lasting majority.

Bill Clinton, the last Democrat president to carry the state of Kentucky, chided his own side last week for blaming the voters rather than themselves. "We have to be present with a compelling message in small towns and rural areas," Clinton said. "If we don't make the message, we can't complain when we are demonised, cartoonised as aliens."

Against Clinton's advice, offered from the hospital bed where he was recovering from heart surgery, Kerry refused to back local bans against gay marriage. "I'm never going to do that," he replied. On right-wing radio stations, an advertisement taunted the Massachusetts senator: "What's the one issue John Kerry hasn't flip-flopped on?" The answer: "Partial birth abortion."

Despite the barrage of attacks, one of the main issues separating the two Americas is political correctness. Middle Americans are not embarrassed to say aloud they would rather their children grew up heterosexual, married a member of the opposite sex and had children within wedlock. If it's not the way things turn out, they'll cope with it.

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