But to answer the question as to why roughly fifty per cent of the US electorate is likely to vote for Bush again in November (his re-election depends on whether this number is slightly higher or lower than fifty, but, by all accounts, it is shaping up to be a tight election which neither candidate is likely to win by much), we have to understand some of the ground realities of US politics and culture.

There is a huge political disconnect between the US and the rest of the world. I remember back in the 1980s when President Reagan was considered a joke around the world. Reagan was almost universally derided as delusional or a simpleton or both. His missteps were the fodder of an army of late-night comics and comedians, and it seemed almost inconceivable that anyone could take the man seriously.

I remember how astonished I was when I landed in the US in 1988 during the last year of his presidency and found that Reagan was a much revered figure to many Americans. Indeed, to this day, many conservative Americans' reverence for Reagan comes close to idolatry. They consider him to be the finest president of the 20th century and the father of the modern conservative movement.

Reagan was not the first president whose reputation within the US diverged significantly from his reputation outside it, and Bush will not be the last.

In fact, I recall how at the height of his impeachment hearings, the reputation of President Clinton around the world was never higher, and he received a standing ovation from world leaders when he addressed them at a meeting of the UN.

But let me hasten to clarify that this disconnect between Americans and the rest of the world that I am writing of is largely confined to conservative Americans. Most Americans (including even many conservatives) thought that President Clinton's impeachment was laughable.

Having lived in the US for almost my entire adult life, I could not help noticing that on just about any issue that you care to mention, most people in the world line up roughly with the Democratic party. Now, if you are conservative, then you are likely to find the Democrats a little too left-wing for your liking, and if you are liberal, then you might find them to be a little too right-wing for your liking.

But chances are that unless you are an American, you will find the Republican position on issues such as abortion, the death penalty, public health, taxes, public education, public expenditure in general, guns, nuclear weapons, the environment, international relations (I could continue) etc etc utterly incomprehensible.

This is one reason why people outside of the US have a hard time understanding George Bush's popularity. There is a massive gulf between where even conservatives in other countries are politically and where conservatives are in the US.

It is as though American conservatives are this small band of dinosaurs whose political beliefs are completely out of step with the mainstream political consensus in the rest of the world (after all, where else but in the US do people question global warming and evolution and consider the UN some kind of shadowy underground organisation bent on world domination?).

Outside of the US, people are stunned that Bush is even president. They cannot understand how someone like him could ever get elected in the first place.

But when we look ahead to the upcoming election, it is not enough to look through our own eyes. If we did that, we would assume that Bush is in deep trouble and that John Kerry is heading for a landslide.

To understand the tightness of this year's US presidential race, the first thing we must to do is to try to look at it through American eyes.

We need to understand how and why Bush was elected in the first place and what the factors are that contribute to his continuing popularity.

Economically, it is hard to see where the Republicans get their votes. The economy boomed under President Clinton's stewardship. His economic policies wiped out the Reagan-era deficits and created a record number of jobs.

In contrast, under President Bush, the US has actually lost jobs, and the Federal budget is a sea of red ink. By any impartial measurement, the economy is in much worse shape than when Bush took it over. Simply put, people are, by and large, worse off than they were four years ago.

Republicans even concede this point. Some might argue that the poor shape the US economy is in is not Bush's fault and that he inherited a recession from Clinton or that the recession is the fault of 9-11 or the business cycle. But most admit that if the election were to be fought on the economy then Bush would be sunk.

So, if it is not economic issues that motivate Bush voters, what is it? The answer is social issues, and it is here that it is possible to comprehend what motivates conservative voters to continue to vote against their own economic interests.

There is a longstanding cultural rift within the US. Some call it the divide between the Red states and the Blue states (based on the 2000 electoral map which divided the nation pretty equally -- Gore taking both coasts (Blue) and Bush taking the South and Southwest (Red) with the industrial Midwest (Purple) split pretty evenly between them.

It is important to understand this cultural rift. It doesn't revolve around economic issues, but around social and cultural ones. In a sense the modern conservative movement in the US dates back to the 1960s and the values and attitudes that were mainstreamed during that tumultuous decade.

The hard-core of the Republican vote comes from those who oppose what they see as the secularisation and liberalisation of the American cultural landscape. To them, the Democratic party is the standard bearer for the counter-cultural values of the 1960s that they feel has precipitated America's moral decline.

To them, Democrats cater to women and minorities and the poor at the expense of everyone else. Interestingly enough, a majority of white men have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president in forty years. Not all white men feel marginalised by women's rights and civil rights and affirmative action or wish to turn the clock back to the 1950s -- but the ones who do, vote Republican.

Conservatives feel that the US has swung too far to the left and that there is nothing more important than standing in the school-house door with a shotgun to halt this slide. They see the Republican party as the party of traditional moral values and the Democratic party as the party of abortion and affirmative action and atheism.

These people will never vote for a Democrat. It doesn't matter how badly the US gets bogged down in Iraq or if Bush is discovered to have been criminally negligent in not preventing 9-11 (oh wait, that happened already).

It doesn't matter how many jobs are lost under Bush or how large the deficit grows or if he accidentally nukes Canada tomorrow. There is a bedrock of about forty five per cent of the US electorate who will never vote for a Democrat.

They may be delusional or living in a parallel universe to the rest of us -- but that is the ground reality of US politics today.

Zafar Sobhan is an assistant editor of The Daily Star.