Has Obama done enough to win over Ohio?
COLUMBUS, Ohio - If there's one thing the patrons at the German Village Coffee Shop here in the Ohio capital can agree on, it's that even though Election Day isn't for months, they're already pretty tired of hearing about politics.
"The debates will be worthwhile, but I think the ads are demeaning," custom clothier Ben Pierpont said over breakfast. Added a woman named Kim, who did not want to give her last name: "I'm absolutely sick of it. You can't even watch a TV show without there being 15 different ads."
Earlier this month, the Campaign Media Analysis Group reported that the number of ads running in Columbus has increased substantially compared to the same period four years ago - and that, "Every presidential ad on the air in Columbus as of July 12 was negative."
For those frustrated with the ads, it's only going to get worse. Columbus and Cleveland are the two largest television markets in a swing state so crucial that a Republican has never won the presidency without winning the Buckeye State. The two cities are among the top 10 markets in the nation for political ads, with more than $28 million spent on the air through June 24.
The consensus in both Democratic bastions is that President Obama, who won this state by 4.6 percentage points in 2008, deserves another four years. But it's far from clear that Democratic voters in either city are motivated enough to come out for him in the numbers they did last time around.
"There seems to be less enthusiasm among the groups that were so important for him in 2008 - young people and minorities," said Ohio State University professor Paul Beck.
Standing in a darkroom in the plant of Horizons Incorporated, a printable aluminum manufacturer in Cleveland, three coworkers nod as 29-year-old Matthew McEachern, clad in a Cleveland Indians cap, says there's no question he'll back Mr. Obama in the fall.
"When you have such a big mess to clean up, it's going to take more time," said McEachern, who, like his coworkers, is African-American. 47-year-old Queenie Smith, who works in a different section of the plant, said she would never vote Republican.
"I just think they're crooked," she said. "I don't think they're for the people. They're for the rich."
But there are signs of concern for the president: Horizons' owner and CEO Herb Wainer, who plans to back Mr. Obama, says he does not see anything approaching the levels of enthusiasm for the president that existed in 2008.
"My sense is there was a spirit of involvement and an opportunity to be connected with something that was new and really interesting and terrific for the country, which was to elect a black president," he said. "I think that had a lot of cache...now it seems like it's all about money, not grassroots."
Back at the German Village Coffee Shop in Columbus, where a rather massive "short stack" goes for just $2, 81-year-old Don Wihl is enjoying a leisurely breakfast. Wihl has been a Democrat all his life - he campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a child - but he says he can't cast a ballot for Mr. Obama.
"He's gotta go. He's just gotta go," Wihl said, pointing to the health care law having been "rammed through" Congress. "He's not qualified for the job. He bites off too much." Wihl added that even though he doesn't know much about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he'll vote for him.
He went on to sum up the economic pessimism felt by many here, a sense of frustration with the economy under Mr. Obama that Romney hopes will propel him to the White House.
"I was born in a depression," he said. "And I'll probably die in a depression."
The argument
The Obama campaign has a simple argument to make to those who say the economy has been bad under the president: Just imagine if Mitt Romney had been in charge.
"The guy's against our automobile industry for goodness sake, and that doesn't bode well in Ohio," said Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. He is referencing Romney's position - articulated in a 2008 column headlined "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" - that Democrats have used (not entirely fairly) to suggest that Romney was willing to let the U.S. auto industry disappear.
The Ohio Democratic Party, with the backing of Politifact, says that 850,000 jobs in Ohio are tied to the auto industry, jobs that would have disappeared without Mr. Obama's decision to use government support to restructure two of the "Big Three" auto companies. They say that without that decision, communities like Lordstown, Ohio - where the General Motors plant, which employs more than 10,000 people, reinstated its third shift in 2010 - would have been left behind.
Chrysler and GM recently hired nearly 2,000 workers in Toledo, where mayor Michael Bell says the auto industry is "one of our anchors." Bell said the city has seen a major economic turnaround in the past three years.
"A large portion of that is tied to the money that was given to the automobile industry that allowed people to go back to work," he said. Beck, of Ohio State, predicted that Mr. Obama "is going to get a lot of voters as a result of the auto bailout, particularly among white working class males."
Also benefiting the Ohio economy - and by extension Mr. Obama - has been the nascent economic boom tied to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," which has given communities like Youngstown, Ohio, a chance at rebirth following the collapse of the steel industry. On the Mahoning River, construction is nearing completion on a new $650 million plant to make the steel tubes used to extract natural gas from underground shale deposits. Twenty million dollars in federal economic stimulus funds was used to help get the project off the ground.
"We feel like this is an opportunity for us," said Tony Paglia, Vice President of Government Affairs at the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce. "We feel like we have been in decline a long time. We want to take advantage of this. We want to make sure it's done right. But we feel pretty lucky in a way that we have another opportunity. We had the steel industry for 100 years or so. Now we're an oil and gas area."
Redfern, of the Ohio Democratic Party, notes that Ohio's unemployment rate has fallen from 10.6 percent in 2009 to 7.3 percent today -- complicating efforts by Ohio Republicans to argue that Mr. Obama has been a poor steward of the economy. He says that attacks on Romney as a potential "outsourcer-in-chief" will resonate in a state where manufacturing remains part of the fabric of everyday life. (Expect Vice President Joe Biden to offer up those sort of attacks when he comes to Columbus Thursday on what is being billed as the "Made in Ohio Manufacturing Tour.")
"The recession was not his doing," Redfern said of the president. "Our policies are what's driving the Midwest out of this Republican recession."
Scott Jennings, Romney's campaign manager in Ohio, argues that voters in the Buckeye State don't see things that way. The GOP message, he said, is this: "Do you think the country is better off than it was four years ago? Do you think you are better off personally? And if not - if not - do you think it's time for a new president?"
Romney, who argues that Mr. Obama is the true outsourcer of American jobs, will make that case during a town hall meeting in the northwestern city of Bowling Green on Wednesday. On the trail, Romney has criticized Mr. Obama for over-regulating American industry - often offering up the president's decision not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline as Exhibit A - and Ohio Republicans say they can depress Democratic turnout and energize their base by casting Mr. Obama as hostile to the coal industry.
"Democrats in rural areas have turned on Obama," said Jennings.
While some areas of the state have started to emerge from the worst of the recession, there remain plenty of regions where residents' economic prospects remain grim. In one striking example, law enforcement officials recently raided eight massage parlors in the once-booming steel town of Warren, which authorities say had become a mecca for prostitution.
The economic picture is not much better in the economically-depressed steel and coal town of Steubenville, in the southeastern part of the state. Employment specialist Dave Higgins, who worked for 40 years in a steel mill, says that the gas and oil jobs that residents had expected to replace steel and coal jobs had for the most part yet to materialize.
(At left, Obama supporters in Steubenville, Ohio, discuss why they support the president.)
"People are waiting for gas and oil to save them," he said. "I don't believe that they will. We have to get manufacturing jobs back in this country. That's all there is to it."
Down the street at Peedee's restaurant, a reporter's questions prompted an argument about politics. After one waitress deemed Obama a "big spender," a man emptying the trash said, "Wait a second. Bush put us in that f***ing hole."
"Well he put us in a hole bigger," the waitress replied, speaking of Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama did not perform particularly well in this region in 2008, something many political observers attributed in part to his race. (Beck of Ohio State University said the best estimates he has seen show that Mr. Obama lost 2-3 percent of the vote in Ohio in 2008 because of his race, with most of the impact coming in this region.) The three Peedee's employees said the president's race surely plays a role in how people in the area vote; asked if Romney's religion mattered to voters here, they said they didn't even know what it was. (Romney is Mormon.) Two then incorrectly identified Mr. Obama's religion as Muslim.
A short walk away at The Spot Bar, Jake Morris, who works at Wal-Mart, manages a garage and has a lawn care business, said race is not the factor in the region that some suggest.
"Maybe 15, 20 years ago, back here it could play a role," said Morris, who is white. "But a lot of different people live around here now. It's not like it used to be back here." Morris paused and motioned to a pair of black men sitting at the table with him. "You look around here, we're all sitting together, we're all hanging out together, it's not like they sit on one side and we sit on the other."
Inside the town's Obama campaign office, Obama supporters Jerry Krupinski and Raymond Martineau argued that Mr. Obama will do well in the area in part because people cannot identify with Romney.
"There's nobody in this entire valley that can spend $4 million on a garage elevator to move his cars around," said Krupinski. "We're working people here. And we're proud of that."
The state of play
To understand Ohio, according to professor Steve Brooks of the University of Akron, you have to divide it into five regions.
Start with the the voter-rich northeast, a Democrat-leaning manufacturing and union stronghold. Drive west and you enter the Republican-leaning northwest, a mixture of farming communities and towns dependent on the auto industry. Due south is the culturally-southern southwest, a Republican bastion containing Cincinnati. Drive east and you hit Steubenville and the rest of the Appalachian southeast, which tends to vote Republican when social issues dominate and Democrat when economic issues are paramount. In the center of it all sits Columbus, which splits down the middle politically, with the suburbs leaning right and the city left.
With a relatively small number of undecided voters up for grabs, Brooks said, the focus for both campaigns is increasing turnout among their base and diminishing turnout for the opposition.
"The key to the race will be whether the working union homes [in the Northeast] become excited," he said. If those voters show up at the polls, according to Brooks, Mr. Obama should be able to take Ohio's 18 electoral votes. For Romney, he said, the key will be energizing voters in and around Cincinnati - something that would become easier if he taps Cincinnati-based Sen. Rob Portman as his running mate - as well as frustrated rural voters. With the election expected to be razor thin - polls now show a virtual tie - the campaigns will also fight hard for the hearts and minds of the suburban voters outside of Columbus, one of the few areas where a significant number of swing voters can be found.
Both sides have reasons for optimism. In 2010, Republican John Kasich managed to unseat Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland; five House Democrats also lost their seats. But last year, Democrats managed to repeal a Kasich-backed anti-union bill similar to the controversial Wisconsin legislation that curtailed bargaining rights for public employees, a victory that re-energized Ohio Democrats after a demoralizing midterm election.
Redfern, of the Ohio Democratic Party, stresses the strength of Democrats' ground game in the state, pointing to 50 Democratic offices statewide. But he predicted that Democrats will be outspent perhaps 5-1 on the airwaves.
"The Koch brothers are going to spend $50 million," he said in reference to prominent conservative donors Charles and David Koch, whose groups are estimated to be spending $400 million on the 2012 election. "There's such saturation of hate against the president."
(At left, Obama supporters in Steubenville, Ohio, discuss why they support the president.)
One wildcard will be the impact of a bill passed by Ohio Republicans eliminating early voting in the three days prior to presidential election; Democrats filed suiton Tuesday in an effort to get that law reversed.
Ultimately, however, both sides agree that the most important factor will be whether Ohioans decide that Mr. Obama has done a good enough job with the fragile economy to earn another four years -- along with whether they see Romney as someone who might do better.
"Just last night, when I was on the phone, I talked to a man who was working for a steel mill, and guess what, he's going to be losing his job pretty soon," said Martineau, the Obama supporter in Steubenville. "...The poor man, he's 54 years old - what is he going to do afterwards? And he's scared to death. He's very angry. And that's where a lot of people around here are."
"They don't know what their future is," Martineau continued. "And they want to have something so they can have a future. They want jobs. It's all about jobs."
This is the latest in a series on CBSNews.com examining the key factors and the people in the swing states that will decide the presidency.
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