Americans take their presidents very personally.
Rather than carefully weighing a candidate's policies, they tend to do a "gut check". If the British could elect the Queen, they too would be less interested in the policies than having someone who shared their outlook. And for millions of Americans, George W Bush managed to connect to voters in a way that Mr Kerry did not.
In large part, it is a trick of political packaging.
In reality, Mr Bush has no more in common with Mid-West values than John Kerry, but he is relentlessly disciplined about masking his true origins (private school, wealth and East Coast privilege) with a down-home folksiness.
Or...
Maybe Conservative Americans really don't hold a person's social background against them. I know it wasn't a factor for me. Liberals are so smugly certain that they are right and Bush is wrong that they can't believe that anyone else could possibly see the merit in the man's policies. Certainly your background can shape you. But it's how you react to those shaping forces over time that determines who you are.
For all their talk about judging people on who they are rather than where they came from, Liberals can be the most prejudiced of all.
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