Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, hit the road again together Tuesday, this time on a bus tour through the battleground state of Ohio on the heels of a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that shows President Obama surging ahead of them in the Buckeye State.
At an outdoor event in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia on Tuesday afternoon, Romney and Ryan rallied supporters together with Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez reports on the latest presidential race poll numbers in Ohio as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan launch a bus tour in the Buckeye State this week.
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“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“Look, President Obama — the economy is barely growing. He’s run out of ideas. And just the other day on TV, he said that he can’t change Washington from the inside,” Ryan told the crowd as he introduced Romney.
“Why do we send presidents to Washington in the first place? I mean, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Don’t we send them to fix the mess in Washington? Look, if he can’t change Washington, then we need to change presidents,” he continued to cheers and applause.
Romney told the crowd that Obama’s vision for the country is “entirely foreign to anything this nation has ever known.”
He took aim at Obama for backing “the idea of a larger and larger government taking more and more from the people, intruding itself in your relationship with your doctor, investing, so to speak, in companies, picking winners and losers or, in his case, losers.”
At the rally and on the TV airwaves, Romney has sought to cast Obama as too lenient on China when it comes to the valuation of that country’s currency and the shipping of U.S. jobs overseas.
Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith responded in a statement by charging that Romney “is apparently trying to remake himself as a China trade warrior. But if his record is any indication, the voters of Ohio should be very wary of Romney’s empty promises on China.”
“Just a few years ago, Romney said that the President’s decision to stand up to China on behalf of American workers in the tire industry was ‘protectionism’ and ‘decidedly bad for the nation and our workers,’ ” Smith said. “In the private sector, he invested in companies that shipped American jobs to China. And we now know that, for years, Mitt Romney has invested in Chinese companies and profited off of their success. When it comes to China, Mitt Romney isn’t a trade warrior, he’s a paper tiger.”
The Tuesday afternoon rally, which followed a solo Ryan event in Cincinnati, marked the first time the nominees had appeared together since just after last month’s GOP convention in Tampa.
The tour comes as a new Post-ABC poll shows Obama leading Romney 52 percent to 44 percent among likely Ohio voters. The survey not only shows Obama taking a lead in the race for Ohio’s 18 Electoral College votes, but it also suggests that voters’ opinions have hardened six weeks out from Election Day. Eighty-five percent of likely Ohio voters who plan to vote for Obama and 86 percent who are backing Romney say they’ll “definitely” vote for their chosen candidate.
That means that the campaigns’ ability to energize their respective bases could matter more than whether they’re able to woo the relatively small number of undecided voters. It also helps explain why the Romney-Ryan ticket enlisted Paul, a tea party favorite, to join them at Tuesday’s event.
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