Why Ohio Will Decide the Presidential Race
Why Ohio Will Decide the Presidential Race
Barack Obama speaks in a different dialect when he stops in Ohio, which seems to be every other day now. Even when delivering his basic stump speech, he will aim a few extra Buckeye-friendly zingers at his rival, Mitt Romney. “Does anybody actually look at that guy and think, ‘Man, he’s really into coal’?” the President asked recently at a rally in Athens. “I wasn’t born into fame and fortune,” he continued. “Nobody was picking me-‘Boy, that guy Barack Obama, he’s going to be President someday.’”
On flat screens now from Marietta to Toledo, there is one particularly edgy chord being struck: “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.” That phrase was once used as racial code by Southern segregationists to rouse white voters. Obama uses it to paint Romney as a sort of rich Uncle Pennybags, defined by his Cayman Islands holdings, a Swiss bank account and his opposition to Obama’s auto-industry bailout. “We won’t take your vast business advice,” Obama thunders at his rival on the stump.
Obama once decried such tactics as a relic of the past, but one need only look at the polls to see why he has dusted them off for 2012. As his margins in swing states shrink to a hairbreadth or vanish altogether, Ohio has emerged as the President’s firewall, its 18 electoral votes his best hope of stopping the surging Romney campaign from winning the White House. It’s a familiar role for the state that has voted for the winning candidate in 27 of the past 29 presidential elections. Obama’s Chicago operation is well aware of the tradition: no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio.
A new Ohio poll for TIME by Abt SRBI shows that Romney still has a ways to go with just two weeks remaining. Among those who have already voted and those who are likely to vote, Obama holds a clear advantage, winning 49% of the state, compared with Romney’s 44%. The President’s advantage is accounted for by those who say they have already voted, a group Obama is winning by a 2-to-1 ratio. Among those likely to vote who had not yet cast a ballot, the race is tied at 45% each.