ZANESVILLE, Ohio -- Spilling diesel fuel into the side tank of a big-rig truck yesterday, Jeff Davis grunted his satisfaction that John Kerry had finally conceded Ohio.

"I'm a Democrat, if you can believe it," Davis said.

Like many people here, he felt less warmth toward President Bush than a profound indifference to Sen. John F. Kerry.

"You ever get a feeling about somebody?" Davis asked. "I would listen to him talk and I'd get the feeling he was just saying things he thought people wanted to hear."

In the end, Kerry, who desperately needed votes in Ohio's rural counties, never managed to say the things people wanted to hear, at least not in a way they believed.

On the car radio, Kerry thanked supporters, speaking in his patrician accent, telling those who backed him he'd done his best. "I did my best to express my vision and my hope for America," Kerry said.

Davis didn't seem to hear him.

"I think my uncle even voted Republican this time, which is weird," he said. He climbed back into the big, blue International 9200, with its custom sleeper cab, and turned east.

The battle for Ohio, the state that decided it all, began in this spot July 31. Kerry surprised local voters by stopping in Republican Muskingum County, with his running mate John Edward, native son John Glenn, and Hollywood star Ben Affleck at his side.

Kerry spoke past the locals, with a message to the terrorists: "You can run, you cannot hide. We will destroy you."

Ten miles away, President Bush spoke to a crowd in nearby Cambridge and seemed to shout his own theme across the Guernsey County border at Kerry.

"I'm running against a man who thinks you can find the heart and soul of America in Hollywood. I know where you can find the heart and soul -- here in Cambridge," Bush said.

Bush's message got through. About Kerry, the locals had, as Davis put it, "a feeling."

Bush took Muskingum County with 21,901 votes to Kerry's 16,050. That win came alongside a statewide ballot measure to outlaw same-sex marriage that won here, 25,019 to 12,044. Those numbers hint that the same-sex proposition might have drawn 4,000 Kerry supporters, offering a window into the kind of cultural issues that cut heavily in the President's favor on Tuesday.

"This is a pretty conservative place," said Mayor John Fenton, a three-term Democrat who describes himself as anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage and a party member who thinks Edwards, the running mate, would have done better in Ohio than Kerry.

"Really, I can't think of what Kerry said to reach the people," Fenton said.

Zanesville and its surrounding counties were once defined by industries. To the east, steel plants churned smoky wealth into the Ohio Valley. To the west, pottery plants -- Weller, Roseville, Hull -- fed the towns that grew up in the middle of farmland.

A bit farther west, in Newark, Licking County, Rockwell International made truck parts for the military. Today, it makes Humvee parts, and is one of the few places in the area sporting newly built homes.

At the White Castle in Newark, Jonas Leckrone took his family out for a meal yesterday. Leckrone had voted for Kerry, had just heard that his man had conceded and was unfazed.

"I can live with it," he shrugged.

Leckrone, retired, voted on the economy and his displeasure with the war in Iraq. His wife, Pat, a member of a generation in which wives once voted the same as their husbands, broke family ranks.

"I got some gay friends but I don't believe they should marry," said Pat Leckrone. Her son's girlfriend, Cathy Dunwoody, assessed Bush's success without hesitating: "His moral beliefs. He has Christian moral beliefs."

Kerry's disconnection with Ohioans was still reverberating on the second floor at the Zanesville Times-Recorder, which surprised people by endorsing the Democrat. The endorsement seemed to move few votes, and editor Jason Maddux said he was surprised that Kerry didn't do just a bit better here.

"I think some of people viewed the campaign attacks on President Bush as unpatriotic," Maddux said.

Muskingum, with its struggling economy, would have seemed ripe for some shifting votes. Then again, he noted, it has a high percentage of hunters, and even in camouflage, a shotgun slung over his arm, Kerry was not going to make inroads against a loudly anti-gun control incumbent.

There was, as well, the war. Muskingum has so far buried two sons since the United States invaded Iraq last year. On his July 31 stopover, Kerry made note that a Zanesville-born Marine, Cpl. Todd Godwin, had been buried a week earlier.

Zanesville embraced the war, an issue that seemed to be a catalyst for exciting other emotional values that center around patriotism and social conservatism.

"If you wanted to distill it to one thing, they didn't want to change horses in midstream. They didn't want a new commander in chief," said Scott Horst, a librarian and self-described "fourth-generation Democrat."

But Horst, who voted for Kerry, and who says he became a more ideologically driven Democrat after the Clinton impeachment six years ago, said his townsmen never connected with Kerry on some elemental level.

"They had misgivings mostly on a personal level. They just seemed to not personally care for him," Horst said.

Davis, the Democratic truck driver who voted his gut, might have summed it up as Kerry conceded yesterday. He was asked if he didn't feel just a bit sorry for the man who had just barely lost the biggest prize in America.

"No, not the least, little bit, " Davis said. "There's just something about him."