Every time I come down the creaking, Victorian staircase of Spitzer House, John McCain makes me jump. When I arrived here, a cheery 5ft Father Christmas stood in the hallway, but then my landlady, Janet Rogers, went shopping for Hallowe'en masks and now smiley Santa is concealed beneath the latex likeness of McCain swathed in a vampire cape. In his left hand is the American flag, under his right arm is the head of Barack Obama.

Beneath the stairwell, in a grotto of plastic pumpkins, sits Hillary Clinton dressed as a witch, alone and plotting perhaps, amid her old campaign material. Janet had plenty left from when Spitzer House B&B was the county HQ of the Hillary for President primary campaign and contributed to her victory over Obama here in Ohio. But now, as her triumphalist Hallowe'en tableaux suggests, Janet, born of a long line of Democrats, is voting Republican.

Her anger with Obama is palpable: “He shunned Hillary as vice-president,” she says. “So I will shun him as president. I didn't like him anyway, but when he didn't even consider Hillary, he made it real easy for me.” Stuffing envelopes for Hillary was the first time Janet, 55, had been politically active. She loved Hillary, a woman from her own generation, for her experience, her dignity through all the sex nonsense with Bill. She takes Mrs Clinton's rejection as a deeply personal affront and has just donated to McCain.

Women such as Janet are Barack Obama's biggest challenge. He must win Ohio: in 2004, a change in just 60,000 votes here would have made John Kerry president. But the female vote has so far been remarkably fickle. The latest Ohio polls put Obama in a statistical tie with McCain among women voters, but nationally among white women his support has fluctuated from +7 before the party conventions, to -11 after Sarah Palin was announced as vice-presidential candidate, to a tie last week, and now back to -11. In an election that will be decided by swing voters, no other group is more significant. Moreover, Obama's task is even harder in small towns such as Medina (population 25,000) since Palin, even before economic turmoil highlighted the divide between wealthy urbanites and ordinary rural dwellers, set herself up as the champion of sincere and honest folks against the big city's cynical elitism.

Medina (we say “Medeena”, but they say “Mediner”) is the mythical small-town America I have never seen before outside wholesome Hollywood movies, as exotic to me in its own way as an Indian village. Laura Russell, a friend I made just eating at the local bar, says: “Ohio is seen as a blah state. You wouldn't come on vacation but it's a fantastic place to live.”

Imagine family life with all hassle and discomfort sucked out: your pretty clapperboard house is roomy, all kids attend excellent local schools and ride their bikes home through quiet streets. You never struggle for a parking space and the council doesn't bug you to recycle. Your town throbs with active citzenship: book groups, church congregations, historical societies, endless sports teams and neighbourhood committees. There is almost zero crime, even teenagers aren't surly, people say “hi” to strangers in the street, don't lock up their valuables at the swimming pool, drive with almost comical courtesy, rarely swear or throw litter and invite foreigners (such as me) back home for dinner. Joe Klein, an American political analyst, wrote recently “the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished”. He can't have visited Medina. I doubt Britain has a town so utterly confident in its shared values. Nor one so friendly. Sarah Palin's convention words “we make good people in our small towns” played pitch perfect here. Every time the Democrats - who need so badly to extend their appeal beyond urban centres - brand her an ill-educated, backwoods hick, the ladies of Medina just draw her closer.

But for all its idyllic attributes, economic problems are hitting Medina, a commuter town for Cleveland, like everywhere else. Before arriving I discover the town even has a street called Wisteria Lane - the name of the now famous setting for the hit TV series Desperate Housewives - and I resolve to interview every decisive housewife living there. Yet driving around I find it truly desperate. Only three houses are occupied, the other is a deserted showhouse. The rest of the street is a trail of unsold lots. “Not long ago these were shooting up,” a builder tells me. “Now they just can't shift ‘em.”

Janet's husband, who manages a firm making building materials, has had his salary cut by 30 per cent after a recent takeover, but even if she blames Bush, she won't take it out on McCain. My new friend Laura, 40, a former high school teacher and now full-time mother, has elderly parents who are contemplating divorce. It is the only way her mother, who has a severe heart condition, could qualify for state medical assistance. Obama's health policies would benefit her own family and yet Laura won't give him her vote.

Laura drives me to a knitting circle held in a restaurant on the edge of town. Making slow progress on a blanket called the Great American Aran Afghan are six ladies of middle years and incomes. All were Democrats, but as Jorja Allen puts it: “The candidates were slim pickings until Sarah Palin came along.”

Libby Russo, 54, a book-keeper for her husband's business,is most vocal: “I like that she's not from Washington. I don't like politicians, but she's fresh. I hate that they're nit-picking about her family, because don't we all have trouble with our kids?”

“Except me,” jokes her friend Nancy Slisko, 49, a mother of three. “My kids are perfect.” Nancy thinks that Obama has no experience and worries that he's the most liberal of all senators, although cannot say why.

“I hate this idea that America is so bad,” says Libby. “We are the first ones to help another country.” She believes that global warming is beyond man's control and, with gas now $4 a gallon, the US should drill for oil. “The polar bears are fine,” she says and the others nod. Of the six women, only two have ever left North America. To them, the Democrat sneers that Palin only just acquired a passport compounds the view that they are East Coast snobs.

Indeed, the distinguishing feature of Obama supporters I meet at the gleaming Medina sports centre, is that they have all travelled abroad and consequently are distressed by America's reputation in the world. “Our foreign policy is a mess,” says Therese Kerns, 44, a teacher. “I want someone who has experience to negotiate with other world leaders.”

But mostly, the women I talk to would have the US rein its neck in, put domestic interests first. Several ask me how Britain views Palin and when I reply somewhere between fascination and horror, they just look hurt. And I realise that it is not that small-town Americans don't care what the world thinks of their nation, for the most part, they simply don't know.

Dozens of women I speak to like Palin because she is “feisty”, “a fighter”, “won't back down”, is a mom just as they are. Despite her embarrassing TV interview with Katie Couric earlier this week in which she struggled to answer questions on foreign policy and business, her upbeat mood in a dark time of war and recession appeals to them. She is can-do about intractable problems, implies you just need to cut through East Coast smart-talk and Washington bull. They don't care whether she understands the Bush doctrine and any Alaskan scandal is dismissed as “Democrats digging for dirt”. Palin is a new American icon: an icon is almost impervious to political weather, an icon just is.

Later I visit Pam Miller, the chairman of the Medina Democrats, at her shop that sells tasteful objets d'arts. A restrained and upright woman, she is saddened about Janet's defection - she too was devastated by Hillary's defeat - but when we speak of Palin she vibrates with fury. “That absolutely abominable woman is an embarrassment to America,” she says. “I cannot believe how someone who supported Hillary and everything she worked for could switch to someone so ignorant, nasty and unqualified. The economy is hurting in Ohio, I can't believe we are being distracted by cultural issues such as creationism and abortion.”

But I am struck by how women on both sides judge Palin largely upon her reproductive choices: one won't support her because she concealed her last pregnancy too long, another because she has too many children. While at the Iceland Stadium in nearby Strongsville I talk to hockey moms kitting up their kids for battle in the rink and, one by one, unprompted, they commend Palin's stand on abortion, for which they see in her Down's syndrome baby that she has paid the highest price.

In these God-fearing small towns, abortion is a moral touchstone. Even those who say they are “pro-choice”, such as Janet Rogers, would permit it only in the strictest circumstances. Moreover few “pro-choice” voters believe that the Republicans would ever ban abortion, even though McCain has declared it his intention to reverse Roe v Wade and is only one Supreme Justice appointment away. Feminists, they say, have cried wolf about this for years.

From Main Street, Medina, it is hard to see how Obama could demonstrate that he has a thing in common with small-town America. He doesn't seem “real”, not with his Kenyan father, his Harvard education, or his effortfully perfect family. And “realness” is the quality by which every candidate is being judged here. Palin is real in glorious technicolour.

On the Democrat campaign HQ is a poster of Obama that says simply “Hope”. But Medina folk, I think, don't need hope. Their lives are pleasant and meaningful. Neither do they need inspirational rhetoric or lofty principles. What they want is cheaper gas.

At Whitey's, the army-and-navy surplus store, I buy my ten-year-old a T-shirt saying “Kill everyone, let God sort them out” from a motherly woman called Debbie Wentz. A registered Democrat, she says: “I don't like Obama, I can't put my finger on why that is. But,” she adds quickly, “it's not race.”

When Laura Russell moved here from central Ohio she was shocked when a neighbour said “and the great thing about Medina is there aren't many black folks”. Indeed there are just 1.2 per cent African-Americans here (compared with 12 per cent in Ohio overall) and I see only a handful around town.

But Obama's race is another factor that marks him out as different, evoking non-specific unease. Janet Rogers worries that his grandfather was a Muslim, that he sat his young girls through the hate sermons of the Rev Jeremiah Wright and didn't put his hand over his heart for the national anthem. Libby at the knitting circle frets that every criticism of an Obama presidency is being fielded as racism. “The race thing just complicates everything,” she says. “I don't think we're ready. We should have a black man standing for vice-president this time. Then we could get used to the idea. Now, quite likely he'll get assassinated and that would cause all kinds of problems.”

I am a lifelong republican (in the British sense), but in Medina find myself oddly grateful for the Queen. At least UK elections aren't about which person best embodies the essence of our nation. Obama isn't even winning over those I meet in Medina who would benefit from his policies because, at heart, they can't see his face on the dollar bill.

Looking at the Obama mask I buy as a souvenir I see the nature of the problem. Lampooning political leaders at Hallowe'en has become a US tradition. But a latex mask of a black man has a hint of eye-rolling minstrel. Is it offensive? Could it be taken the wrong way? The women of Medina, sipping Earl Grey in Miss Molly's chitzy tea-rooms, would rather elect someone with whom they feel comfortable - a fellow mom you could chat with while watching hockey practice - than have to walk on eggshells for four years.

Moose-hunting, Sarah Palin style: Watch Ben Macintyre's video from the Alaskan wilderness here

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