As always, Jon, your observations are right on the target. I was saying it time and again on this list that this election is a culture war between American narrow minded provincialism and American urbane elite. However, I grossly underestimated the size and strength of the provincialism. It certainly look much more urbane here, on the East Coast. Knowing that, I though Pennsylvania was a microcosm of the "middle Amerika" but that was way too optimistic as well.
Given this election's huge turnout and the fact that Bush got absolute popular majority (about 52%) - two conclusions seem to be in order.
1. The Liberals and Left were dead wrong thinking that mass mobilization would turn election results in their favor. Populism is a central myth in Liberal and left worldview and that myth proved to be patently false. The utter collapse of that central myth also spells the de death knell to other corollaries of the Left thinking, such as that Democrats are doing poorly because they are insufficiently progressive. The truth is that they are doing poorly because they are too progressive and they will do even worse now that republicans learned how to mobilize the apathetic masses.
2. Another central myth of the Liberal and Left thinking that the federal entity aka US is a nation, as it is commonly understood in the Western world, also needs a substantial overhaul. From a sociological point of view, the federal entity aka US is not a nation but an assembly of several social grouping with distinct cultural identities speaking different vernaculars that only on the surface sounds like a lingua franca and having a rather loose sense of mutual connection. How little these groups have in common was clearly demonstrated in this election (cf. the anti- gay civil union initiatives that passed by huge margins).
These two observations lead to the conclusion that if the Liberals and Left are to survive as a force to be reckoned with on this side of the pond at all, they must totally redraft their political strategy to that dumps any though of mass mobilization and instead maximize their minority status which invariably means pursuing proportional representation in one form or another.
One way to pursue is to work toward greater sovereignty of individual states and eventual breakup of the federal entity or perhaps reconstituting it more like a loose confederation of sovereign states - similar to EU. That might also entail introduction of proportional representation on the state level.
The bottom line is - do not think nation and popular mobilization. Think individual states and maximizing the impact of minority groups.
Wojtek