Their pay is steady, but even low inflation has eaten away their income. They wonder openly whether the system is broken. They say they doubt either candidate can fix it.

Mr. Obama, they say, is honest and has good ideas, but no spine to carry them out. “Obama says he’s going to put more out for education,” said Mr. Russell, who wants to improve his skills but lacks money for more schooling. “But like his medical plan, I highly doubt that what comes out the other end is going to be what went in.

“If you’re willing as a leader to say, I’ll get 100 percent — oh, I’ll take 60 — you’re not accomplishing what you set out to do. Do you really believe he’s going to do it in next four years?”

Mr. Romney might run the country better, they say, but he is clueless about the average person’s needs. Witness, Ms. Russell said, his comments about the 47 percent of Americans who pay no taxes or depend on government handouts. “Me personally, I’ve never been on public assistance,” she said. “But I definitely have friends who are single mothers who could not go to work without it.

“To me, it shows he’s in a different wage bracket than the rest of us,” she said.

Mr. Russell scoffed at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that children should borrow from their parents to pay college tuition instead of seeking government loans. It is a notion, he said, that only someone with wealthy parents would propose.

Then again, Ms. Russell said: “I don’t know that that will make him worse than Obama — that he can do enough good that it will trickle down to us.”

The Russells concede that their indecision is not for lack of information. Like virtually every family in Ohio, they have watched the debates, talked with friends and read the material hung on their doorknobs, although they have drawn the line at listening to robo-calls. In short, they have been drenched by a fire hose of creative persuasion of the quality and volume that only two billion-dollar campaigns could muster.