The first lady had just arrived in Ohio to shore up the vote. A choir of pensioners in star-spangled costumes welcomed her with a song about peace in front of a banner with the sign of a dove. Had they stumbled into the wrong Victory 2006 rally or were Republican times a-changing? Inside the hall, there were affectionate cheers for Laura Bush as she urged the audience to “go out and bring some more supporters to the polls”. Reeling off a list of her husband’s achievements, such as tax cuts, she continued: “Thanks to our troops, the Iraqi people are free from the oppression of Saddam Hussein and working to build a democratic country.” There was a stony silence and she quickly moved on.

The crowd was composed of hand-picked Republican supporters, yet even here there were defectors. “To be honest, I’m not as big a fan of President Bush as I was,” said Gloria Murray, 51. “I don’t know that it is his fault exactly, but there have been a lot of mistakes that have lost people’s respect.”

Where to begin? Perhaps with Hurricane Katrina, which sank New Orleans and Bush’s reputation for competence. Or the sleazy corruption and sex scandals, such as congressman Mark Foley’s suggestive e-mails to teenage boys under his tutelage. Plenty of disgruntled conservatives would cite the national debt, which is approaching $9 trillion, or this year’s projected government deficit of $300 billion.

Murray might have been willing to overlook one or more of these missteps but not the war in Iraq. It easily tops her list of grievances. “I’d like to see America pull out,” she said bluntly. “Young men are dying there every day. The Iraqis hate us. They absolutely loathe us over there.”

Disillusion with the war, once confined to the left, has entered the political mainstream. A lifelong Republican, Murray is thinking of voting for the Democrats on Tuesday. It is time Congress changed hands, she believes. “We need some checks and balances. It is common sense not to let one party run everything.”

Prominent neoconservatives have been joining in the Bush-bashing. Richard Perle, an advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein, told Vanity Fair this weekend: “If I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?’, I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies’.”

For this, Perle added, George W Bush was to blame. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.”

The verdict in this week’s mid-term elections could be devastating for Bush and turn him into a lame-duck president. With his reputation under fire, the ballot is shaping up to be a referendum on his presidency. “Put on your track shoes, we’re going to run to the finish,” Bush has been telling Republicans. But how many supporters has he left by the wayside?

IN 2004 many Britons were bewildered when Americans voted to give Bush a second term in the White House. “How can 54,054,087 people be so dumb?” the Daily Mirror wondered. In The New York Times last week, commentator Thomas Friedman, a former supporter of the Iraq war, said he did not believe the American public would be “stupid” enough to re-elect a team that has behaved with such “a level of deadly incompetence”.

Have American voters finally given up on their president? Or will Bush confound the obituary writers again? Seasoned pollsters are predicting a “wave” of losses that could signal a new era in American politics. A poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal and NBC last week found that voters wanted the Democrats to control Congress by 52% to 37%. According to Amy Walter of the independent Cook Political Report, the Republicans are holed beneath the waterline. “You have a bucket and your ship is filling up. But for every bucket you bail, another wave is coming in.” Not so fast, Republicans counter. In this final stretch, the Republicans are dumping millions into television advertisements and are deploying their vaunted 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation, overseen by Bush’s “brain”, Karl Rove. Every potential conservative voter is being funnelled towards the polling booth. If Rove can pull off one last victory, his mastery of the electoral arts will be complete.

Yet the Republicans’ internal polling suggests the House of Representatives is a lost cause. Republicans are lagging in as many as 22 seats: far more than the 15 needed for control to pass to the Democrats. In the Senate, the six seats necessary for a Democratic takeover hang in the balance.

Newt Gingrich, mastermind of the 1994 “Contract with America” mid-term elections when Republicans swept to victory in the House of Representatives, said all the Democrats had to do to win this year was to ask voters: “Had enough?”

THE answer in Ohio would appear to be a resounding “yes”. In 2004 the Midwestern state was crucial to Bush’s victory. Had John Kerry, the Democrat nominee, won an extra 60,000 votes there, he would be sitting in the White House today. Although the economy is doing well nationally and the Dow Jones index hit a record high recently, factories have been closing across the rustbelt state.

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