The Democrats have failed to reach out to a key working-class constituency, writes Conor O'Clery.
Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is best known as Amish country, and when President Bush visited there last week, reporters highlighted the fact that there were several "Dutch" people scattered among the crowd in traditional dress. However, talking to pro-Bush partisans at the rally I noted that many people had looks and surnames that would be familiar in Northern Ireland.
A lot has been written about the Catholic Irish vote in the United States and its influence on elections, but as America goes to the polls today, it is the Scots Irish, those unsung immigrants who determined the dominant culture in the south and much of the midwest, who could swing the outcome of this election.
Some 30 million Americans are of Scots-Irish descent, and many other immigrants have adopted their character traits, which include a respect for strong leadership, military service, family values, and religious faith, the very values promoted by George W. Bush.
The Scots Irish vote is the secret weapon of the Republican Party, according to James Webb, author of a powerful new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots Irish Shaped America (published in the US by Broadway Books). It is a story of endurance and strife by Presbyterian immigrants which started nearly 300 years ago in central Pennsylvania in the very place where Bush visited last week.
Now an area of carefully manicured farms and craft shops, Lancaster was the focus of the first great surge of Scots-Irish migration from Ulster from 1720-1730. There were three more waves of Ulster-Scots migration, the second to Virginia in 1740-'41, the third in the mid-1750s into south-west Virginia and the Carolinas, and the last around 1775, also into the Carolinas. Today the highest concentration of Scots Irish is in Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, the deep south states from Virginia through to Alabama, and farther west in Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado.
There are also Scots Irish concentrations in New Hampshire, the only north-eastern state George Bush carried in 2000 (where one can find adjacent towns called Derry and Londonderry). These tough new arrivals, whose ancestors had been Scots and English lowlanders a century before, brought their fierce loyalties and fighting tradition to America. It was a cultural tradition in which they measured people by personal honour, dignity and the willingness to fight for their beliefs.
A key to their political allegiance is that most are "strangely unenvious of wealth". Webb traces this to the system of interlocking loyalties developed under the lairds in lowland Scotland, where the kirk rejected the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and replaced it with bottom-up elected councils. This individualism and right to reject authority helped shape modern America's unique populist-style democracy.
It also helps answer the question that observers of elections in the United States inevitably ask themselves: why do so many underprivileged Americans vote against their economic interests? At the Republican rally in Lancaster, and at many other Bush campaign stops, it was evident to reporters that the majority of the supporters were blue-collar and service workers, whose economic interests, one might think, would be better served by the Democratic Party, which ostentatiously champions the poor.
The phenomenon is also examined in another election-year book, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas, in which the author examines the popular support in the poorest counties of Kansas for George Bush. He concludes that many of the inhabitants are a conservative, fundamentally religious people, who are easily provoked by evangelising, anti-abortion Republican zealots into a revolt against the Godless liberal establishment.
The very source of such antagonism is explored by Webb, who notes that Republican strategy is heavily directed towards keeping peace with this culture, which is seduced every four years by the "siren songs" of guns, God, flag, abortion and success in war. "The fierceness of their refusal to accommodate the Anglican theocrats in Ulster created their radical politics of non-conformism" in America, explains Webb, a former secretary of the navy and Vietnam veteran.
After abandoning a life in Northern Ireland where they were expected to act as a perpetual bulwark for the Anglican rulers against the Catholic Irish, these people also refused to "bend the knee" to New York and Boston elites descended from the same ethnic source.
They fought fiercely for the Confederate side in the Civil War, though they were dirt-poor themselves, and during the first decade of reconstruction were treated like dirt by the victorious Northerners.
With such folk memories, no wonder that a Massachusetts liberal like John Kerry finds it hard to make inroads in southern states. Webb makes the case that the feeling is mutual, that America's ruling class has a visceral dislike of this group, seen by them as bigoted "rednecks". In the Wall Street Journal, he wrote last week that George W. Bush conveys to this core voting group that he is one of them by speaking in a "quasi-rural" dialect, and by championing "the familiar mantra of strong leadership, success in war, neighbour helping neighbour and belief in God."
Webb chided Democrats for not even recognising the existence of the Scots Irish, who are so individualistic that to define themselves as an ethnic group - like the Irish Americans or Italian Americans - would be to counter their very perception of themselves as Americans.
This group, which has provided America with several presidents starting with Andrew Jackson, has been alienated to the detriment of the Democratic cause, something that was recognised by Howard Dean during the Democratic primaries when he tried to raise the importance of getting the votes of guys who drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flags.
Webb, whose own ancestors are Scots-Irish who settled in the Appalachian Mountains, notes that they are deeply patriotic and have consistently supported every war that America has fought, providing some of the toughest American generals - among them Ulysses S. Grant and George S. Patton - and usually most of the casualties. Traditionally they elected to serve in the Marine Corps, whose colours are green, and not the blue of the Yankee Army in the Civil War, and it is the Marines who are today taking the heaviest casualties in Iraq (nine on Friday alone).
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Republicans have their firm loyalty, Webb cautions. The outsourcing of jobs has hit them hard, as has the decline in public education. And their sons and daughters "serve in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question".
But for most, Bush, the tough-talking commander-in-chief at a time of war, would seem to be their choice.