WITH its 18 electoral-college votes, Ohio is the third-richest swing-state prize. But Mitt Romney’s operatives seem confident of victory in Florida, and Pennsylvania seems out of reach to him, so Ohio is now the largest of the states still in serious contention in a finely balanced race. As in 2004, Ohio looks as though it may even tip the result one way or the other, thus guaranteeing that it continues a record of going with the winner that stretches back to 1964. Yet with the election just ten days away, Ohio is too close to call. Although most polls put Barack Obama ahead, Mr Romney has closed the gap to just a point or two.

In 2008 Mr Obama won Ohio by 52% to 47%. David Johnson, who runs a tile-making business out in the depressed east of the state and is also the chairman of the Columbiana County Republican Party, thinks things are very different now. John McCain, he reckons, was a poor candidate, “and this time we have an excellent one. Since the first debate there’s been a level of enthusiasm among our volunteers that was completely lacking last time.” He praises Mr Romney most for understanding that it is businesses, especially small ones, that create jobs. Jobs in general ought not to be an insuperable problem for Mr Obama in Ohio: the unemployment rate, at 7.0%, is nearly a point below the national average, in part because of amazing good fortune in the shape of the Utica shale, a trove of natural gas in the east of the state. It is now being enthusiastically fracked, yielding riches only dreamed of in 2008. Mr Obama, though, has to share some of the credit for Ohio’s solid recovery with John Kasich, the hyper-energetic Republican governor elected in 2010 in elections that saw Democrats trounced at every level. That makes it hard for independent voters to know whom to praise and whom to blame. A bigger worry for Mr Obama ought to be coal, again concentrated in the poorer Appalachian east of the state. On October 20th hundreds of people waited in driving rain in a muddy field outside the tiny town of Belmont to hear Paul Ryan, the vice-presidential nominee, inveigh against what Republicans call the “war on coal”, a set of carbon-reduction regulations enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency that has forced some coal-fired generating plants to close and imposed higher costs—and so higher electricity prices—on others. Ohio gets more than 80% of its energy from the stuff, and cares little these days about global warming. The row over coal is especially damaging for the president because it hurts him in areas of Ohio that have traditionally voted Democratic.

Mr Obama is on firmer ground when it comes to cars. An estimated 850,000 Ohio jobs depend on the industry, and his rescue of GM and Chrysler has helped to save a lot of them. Ads claiming that Mr Romney was prepared to let the industry go bankrupt may not be fair (Mr Obama, after all, put the two firms through a managed bankruptcy process, just as Mr Romney advocated, though Mr Romney’s version, involving no government money, would have taken a lot longer), but they certainly resonate. Republicans in the state, like Jim Renacci, a congressman defending one of only two Ohio seats in contention this time, argue that Mr Obama’s bail-out was a sweetheart deal for the car unions and merely delayed the sort of full-scale restructuring that the firms need. But the bail-out seems more popular in Ohio than not, judging by how little Republicans talk about it and how often Democrats do. In the end Ohio will be settled not by ideology, but by the grim mechanics of voter turnout. With 35 days to vote in (Ohio has one of the earliest start-dates for early voting in America, and a third of its votes will be cast before election day), good organisation is critical. Here the incumbent has some obvious advantages. Obama for America, his nationwide campaign team, made Ohio a priority, and never really went away after 2008. The organisation failed to make its mark at the 2010 mid-terms (Mr Obama was not on the ticket), but then got a fillip a year later when it helped defeat Governor Kasich’s plans for public-sector reform in a referendum. OFA Ohio now boasts 125 offices, against the 40 Romney “Victory Centres” in the state.

The Democrats clearly have better technology, including Dashboard, a whizzy app that helps volunteers meet up, place phone calls to undecided voters and watch the latest Obama videos. (Quality control could be an issue, though: anyone, including your correspondent, can sign up to become part of the OFA virtual machine.) But the Republicans, motivated by an intense hatred of Mr Obama, are more fired up; they claim that this time they are having more success with getting their voters to the polls early, which means that they will vie with the Democrats in chivvying the recalcitrant to vote on election day.

Mr Ryan and Mr Romney are taking the fight into their opponent’s territory: Mr Obama has recently confined himself to campaigning in safe university towns. But he has formidable strengths to fall back on. Cuyahoga County, which encompasses blighted Cleveland, voted for Mr Obama by 69% to 30% in 2008, a handy and compact vote-bank 460,000 strong. As Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, puts it, “We want to get everyone out to vote. If everyone votes, we win.”