More from that same article in The Guardian,

Remember that in 2004 every American city with a population over 500,000 voted Democrat, and the Republicans won by taking the countryside and the outer suburbs. The blue state/red state division is better expressed in terms of the persistent conflicts between the big cities and their rural hinterlands, over land use, water rights and environmental, class and cultural issues. Red states are simply those where the country can outvote the urban centres, while in blue states the opposite is true.

and if the dems care about having a candidate with broad appeal….

So Obama’s victory over Clinton in rural Nevada says something important about his ability as the apostle of national reconciliation. To win against Clinton in Elko County (black population: 0.8%), he had to convert not only white Democrats, but a large number of independents and people who had voted Republican until caucus day; a feat he pulled off with dazzling facility. Any Democrat nominee who can do that, deep in Republican country, is likely to gain the presidency; and Obama has proved that he can.

This article in The Guardian imagines the Republican primaries as a cocktail party…

Planetary distances of policy and world-view divide these men, and the Republican debates have the air of cocktail parties whose guests have been selected by random telephone dialling. The candidates deliver monologues: Romney talks chalk, Huckabee cheese, Giuliani cabbages, McCain kings. Here and there a familiar term spoken by one contender - “Iraq”, “abortion”, “tax code”, “illegals” - will trigger a sudden animated reflex from another, but the prevailing mood is one of bemused civility, as at the cocktail party where the plumber’s mate stares gloomily into his glass, waiting for the plant geneticist to stop maundering on about rice genomes so that he can get back to the important topic of stopcocks.

This has come about of course because of Rove’s molding of Reagan’s

grand alliance of fundamentalist Christians, corporate CEOs, libertarians, neoconservatives and traditional small-government-big-defence types

and each segment of the alliance has (had) its own hero

Now the fundamentalists have their own candidate (Mike Huckabee); the corporations theirs (Mitt Romney); the libertarians have Ron Paul; just hours ago, the neocons still had Rudy Giuliani,

From the outside, it looks like McCain is the only one who actually represents conservative values - but what do I know? - and the other lot don’t seem to like him very much.