In the Battleground of Battlegrounds

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“[Romney and his campaign] know they’re behind in Ohio. They’ve gotta fix this and it’s all about … I tell people basically it’s about Toledo. Romney is losing in Toledo because [of] the auto worker[s] there. [The] President’s overperforming with white men. Romney’s made up ground in coal country, down in southeast Ohio, but not up there in Toledo.” – Chuck Todd, MSNBC debate coverage, 2012.10.22 (video)

Welcome to my nightmare, folks. I am living in ground zero of the election endgame, and it is not pretty.

My illness prevented me from covering the first two debates; Romney got the strong performance he needed giving all the voters who needed one good reason to vote for him that reason, unlike his convention speech that wound up overshadowed by Clint Eastwood and whatever that thing was he did. Romney looked capable and professional, and I think Democrats are still trying to figure out why Obama dropped the ball so badly in that first debate. Even though Obama seemed to win both the other debates, and Biden won the vice-presidential debate, the numbers haven’t moved that much as a result (except Gallup’s poll numbers, which are so different from every other poll that’s out there that I don’t give them much weight), and as we get closer to Election Day the state polls are starting to firm up, and thanks to that first debate it’s now clear that Romney has a viable path to 270 electoral votes.

We’re still far enough removed from the election that defining a “swing state” remains a fairly imprecise art. For the sake of argument let’s give Romney the states of Florida (even though some polls are showing a tie there now) and Virginia (even though I don’t think we can get accurate prediction models there because Virgil Goode’s candidacy could throw a real monkey wrench into Romney’s campaign. Let’s also give the Democrats both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania because the numbers just aren’t moving the way Republicans need them to move, despite the rhetoric they’re putting out. My sense is that these selections are more optimistic for Republicans — Nate Silver has Obama carrying Virginia right now — but this leaves us with five states that could be swing states here: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Here’s an interactive map you can use to game this out. Assigning the other states to the candidate with the lead right now, that puts Romney up 248-247.

The endgame strategy then becomes clear. Unless a candidate manages to sweep the other four states, both Obama and Romney need Ohio to get to 270. Unless another state somehow switches over, Ohio is a literal must-win for both of them. (The nightmare scenario would be Obama getting Ohio and New Hampshire but losing the other three, which would result in a 269-269 tie.) Under normal circumstances an election climate like the one we have right now would favor Republicans in Ohio, but the combination of the auto bailout and the drubbing Republicans took last year when they tried to ram through Wisconsin-style rollbacks of union rights (and got their keysters handed to them when it was on the ballot last November) have made the state lean more Democratic than it would otherwise, as evidenced by the lead Obama’s had in statewide polls the entire election cycle.

In this age of micro-targeting, though, Romney and his campaign know what to do. First they had to shore up their support in the southern part of the state, which has been a stronghold for them as long as I’ve been alive. They claim to have done that, and I don’t doubt them on that issue. After that, though, comes the tough part: Convincing those of us up north, who tend to be culturally conservative (thanks to a high proportion of Catholics in the area) but vote Democratic because of the influence of the auto industry and unions in the development of our cities, to vote for them. Assuming Virginia goes for Romney and Florida doesn’t come back into play, there’s no realistic way Romney can win the presidency unless he gets Toledoans to vote for him. Similarly, Toledo has become a huge firewall for the Obama campaign; Joe Biden spoke at the University of Toledo earlier today, and I get the feeling that we’ll see more of him, if not Obama himself, in the next two weeks.

I should have known something was up when I was online Sunday and I couldn’t view a single video without first having to sit through thirty seconds of Mitt Romney talking about manufacturing jobs. I doubt there’s a more valuable commodity in America right now than advertising time and space in Toledo over the next two weeks, and with Romney now having more than a fighting chance to win, a whole lot of the money that Romney and Republican-leaning PACs have built up for this election, to say nothing of Obama and Democratic-leaning PACs, is probably going to find its way to one of my local television stations or newspapers. Last week after I did my photoshoot at Wildwood I went to a pizzeria for dinner, and the radio station was playing more presidential campaign ads than they were songs. Maybe some of the stations will just clear their schedules altogether just to play ad after ad and rake in those dollars.

As important as this election is, and as good as I am at avoiding the venues where political ads are legion, there’s still a very large part of me that cringes at the thought of living in Toledo these next two weeks and putting up with the  deluge of advertising and attention we’re about to get. I already voted absentee, so trying to convince me to change my vote is kind of pointless now, but I know that’s not going to stop some people from trying. I’ve had to deal with much worse than this, of course, and I know I’ll survive the coming two weeks, but I’m really not looking forward to it.

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