Bush rides towards win on back of the religious Right

The likely success for George Bush will mark a triumph for his strategy of appealing to core Republican voters and America's religious Right.

The new political map of the United States displays the trend with a clear band of Bush victories across the "Bible belt" of southern and midwestern states.

George W Bush is a born-again Christian who is not shy of talking publicly about his religious faith.

But it is his policies on key touchstone issues that have won him strong support from evangelical voters.

Around one-fifth of American voters consider themselves born-again Christians, and they supported Bush over Kerry by a four-to-one margin - a similar pattern to four years ago.

Voters who declared that "moral values" were the deciding factor in how they voted were the most likely to opt for the Republican candidate.

The President personally opposes abortion, although he has done little to change the law during his first

term in the White House.

John Kerry backs a woman's right to choose abortion.

More divisive as a campaign issue was the question of gay marriage. The President is a fierce opponent and Republicans portrayed Mr Kerry as a supporter because his home state of Massachusetts was one of the first to legalise it.

Meanwhile, pro-Kerry pundits predicted the President would be harmed by his policy of opposing stem cell research. While many Christians want an outright ban on experiments using human embryonic stem cells, scientists say such work could lead to cures for serious diseases.

Superman actor Christopher Reeve was a campaigner for stem cell research and the timing of his death last month propelled the issue to the forefront of the campaign. But the Bush campaign managed to escape most of the fall-out.

In a two-party race like the American presidential contest, conventional wisdom dictates that the winner will be the side that captures the centre ground - as New Labour proved in 1997 and 2001.

But Republican strategist Karl Rove set off on a different track. The thinker who fused neo-Conservatism and the religious Right set out to secure re-election for President Bush by maximising the vote among core Republican constituencies, in particular churchgoers.

Political analysts pointed out that millions of Christians who instinctively lean to the Right failed to vote in 2000, some put off by lurid stories about the President's playboy past before he turned teetotal around his 40th birthday.

By scaring voters about John Kerry's

liberal views, the theory went, the Republicans could squeeze more votes out of their own base without having to water down their message and woo moderate Democrats.

Today it seems the tactic worked. Results of referendums run yesterday, in parallel to the presidential ballot, pointed to the strength of feeling in middle America over the gay marriage issue.

Voters in 11 states were asked to approve constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage. With one result still to come, the first 10 states to declare all backed the proposal - in most cases by overwhelming margins.

The ban on gay marriage was carried by three-to-one margins in Kentucky and Georgia, and by six-to-one in Mississippi.