Trailing in most Ohio polls, Mitt Romney on Friday sought an upset in the ultimate battleground, imploring voters to give him a state win that could send him over the top on election day.
The Republican nominee and his rival for the White House, incumbent Barack Obama, both converged on Ohio just four days before November 6, stumping for undecided voters and urging their faithful to head to the ballot box next Tuesday in a state where all is up for grabs.
Romney, in his opening stop in Wisconsin and two events in Ohio, was greeted with chants of “four more days” as he vowed a new beginning for America, urging voters to compare his record to Obama’s.
“Ohio, you’re probably going to decide the next president of the United States,” he told supporters in Etna, before heading to a huge rally with some 100 party luminaries including House Speaker John Boehner, ex-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain and Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan.
Romney’s campaign said 30,000 people were on hand at the event in West Chester; police put the figure at closer to 18,000. Either way, it was the largest Romney rally since August’s Republican National Convention.
After more than a year of campaigning, including a hard-fought Republican primary and a bitter general election race that has seen at least $2 billion spent by both sides, Romney recognized his presidential dream was reaching its final stages.
“Now we’re almost home,” the Republican nominee said. “One final push will get us there. We’ve known many long days and short nights, and we are so very very close.
“The door to a brighter future is there, it’s open, it’s waiting for us. I need your vote, I need your help,” he said.
Romney and Obama are locked in a neck and neck race that will be decided Tuesday by a handful of toss-up states. Each intends to visit most of them — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and Ohio again — in an 11th-hour appeal to undecided voters in the run up to election day.
Ohio is perhaps the most critical, seeing as no Republican has ever clinched the presidency without also winning the Buckeye State.
Romney pledged to make a “fresh start” for America if he won, he said earlier in Wisconsin.
For months, Romney has hammered away at his rival’s record, stressing the president’s inability to speed up the sluggish economic recovery while touting his own achievements in business and as a Massachusetts governor.
Romney’s speeches Friday struck an optimistic, join-our-cause tone. But he also attacked Obama as a job-killer who doubled the federal deficit and failed to bring unemployment down much below the rate when he took office.
“Words are cheap. A record is real and earned with effort,” Romney said.
“Candidate Obama promised changed, but he could not deliver it. I promise change, and I have a record of achieving it.”
Among the key issues circulating in the feverish pre-election mix was Friday’s jobless report, which showed the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.9 percent and the US economy adding a better-than-expected 171,000 new jobs.
In a statement Romney said the report showed the economy was at a “virtual standstill,” but he didn’t dwell on it in his speech.
“He said that the unemployment rate would now be 5.2 percent; today we learned that it is 7.9 percent,” Romney said. “It is nine million jobs short of what he promised.”
Romney touched on several of the flashpoints of the campaign: rising gas prices, trillions of dollars in debt, excessive regulation, stagnant take-home pay and “fears that the American dream is fading away.”
But in keeping with his moderating trend of recent weeks, he also stressed his own efforts at bipartisanship.
“I won’t just represent one party, I’ll represent one nation. I’ll try to show the best of America, at a time when only our best will do,” he said.
Romney makes his Ohio play
