The latte liberals who gather in Portland’s coffee shops each morning now have the chance to take their adoration of Barack Obama to its logical conclusion: they can drink him.

At the Bipartisan Café in Stark Street, customers are being offered “Obama Blend” coffee, combining beans from Kenya, the birthplace of his father, and Indonesia, where the candidate spent much of his childhood. Peter Emerson, the café’s owner who sports a pony tail and a fashionable wisp of hair on his lower lip, was one of an estimated 75,000 people packing Portland’s Waterfront Park on Sunday for Mr Obama’s biggest rally yet.

At breakfast yesterday, he said: “I’ve never had a candidate who makes me feel excited like this. This is a liberal city and there are a lot of people here who love him, myself included.”

Oregon’s Democratic primary today is expected to deliver the votes Mr Obama needs to claim a majority of elected delegates, another nail in Hillary Clinton’s coffin or — as he prefers to put it — “a major milestone” in a race drawing to an end.

Although the state features vast tracts of high plains, wild country and conservatively minded dusty towns in the east, the weight of population tilts towards the western districts around Portland where they like to say that the proximity of the Pacific opens minds to progressive values.

Almost 2,500 miles east in the Kentucky Appalachian hillsides it is a different story. A short drive from Mount Sterling, in tiny communities clustered among the Daniel Boone National Forest, they do not hunt for sport.

They shoot deer and wild turkey to feed themselves. Their freezers are filled with meat. Guns are passed from father to son like a rite of passage. And they are taught how to fight.

In Kentucky’s primary today Mrs Clinton is expecting another landslide, after her 41-point rout in neighbouring West Virginia last week. The Appalachian Mountains pass through all the states that she has won since March, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, as well as Kentucky.

Trace nearly every county Mrs Clinton won by more than 60 per cent, and a fairly accurate map of Appalachia emerges. The contrast between Oregon and Kentucky represents the Democratic Party’s demographic divide. As his victories in predominantly white Iowa, Kansas and Utah prove, Mr Obama does not have a problem with all white voters.

In a sign that the divide might be bridged, he yesterday gained the endorsement of Robert Byrd, 90, the longest-serving Democrat Senator, who was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his native West Virginia. Senator Byrd described Mr Obama as “a shining young statesman”. But in much of Appalachia, whose inhabitants have largely remained low down the social and economic ladder, Mr Obama is still a scary figure.

Jim Webb, a Democratic senator, former Marine and possible Obama running-mate, wrote in his 2004 book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, that his ancestors “migrated to the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains, bypassing even the rudiments of colonial civilisation”. Confronted by a black, Harvard-educated candidate with a Muslim name who talks about bringing America together in harmony, the people of Appalachia worry that he might even try to include them.

“I hate to say it but it’s probably because people here are racist,” said Byron Schroedel, as he served barbecued pork in his Mount Sterling café, a pretty, tiny town settled in the late 1700s and now firmly established as an outpost of Clinton country. “People here are afraid of change. Obama is too different.”

“The Muslims have been our enemies for thousands of years. Obama’s been running shaking hands for two years. This is a plot,” said Everett Montgomery, an octogenarian waiting to see Bill Clinton in Mount Sterling yesterday.

Mr Obama’s strategists acknowledge that they have an “Appalachian problem”. Perhaps, they argue, he can do without the region in November’s general election by reaching out to new voters, independents and youth to put other states into play.

They have high hopes of winning Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota and Missouri. Later this week he will spend several days campaigning in Florida, a crucial battleground in the last two presidential elections.

But the Democratic primary has exposed how difficult it will be to put together a winning coalition. At the Obama rally in Portland on Sunday, the crowd was like a well-behaved rock concert — Woodstock on iced coffee rather than brown acid. The crowd appeared affluent and well educated as they bounced beach balls around their heads.

His first three words, on seeing the thronging masses beneath him, were: “Wow! Wow! Wow!” They all whooped with delight when Mr Obama spoke of protecting the environment or his “higher purpose” that included plans for teaching children more music and arts in schools.

In the Bipartisan café yesterday Mr Emerson admitted that a straw poll of his customers showed nearly three quarters backed Mr Obama.

But he is worried about appearing too one-sided and there is talk of launching a John McCain roast with beans from Panama, where the Republican nominee was born.

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