I heard versions of it again and again during the day. “Romney’s kind of…pffft,” said Thomas Lapelusa, a middle-aged man on disability in South Columbus. “He’s for the rich people.” At a polling station in a Catholic Church on the city-suburb line, I spoke with Michael Murphy, a 38-year-old FedEx employee, who voted for the first time in this election because he simply couldn’t abide Romney: “He’s in it for himself. All he cares about is taking over companies and bankrupting them and leaving people with no jobs. And that’s what he’d do as president—send jobs to China.”

In the suburb of Hilliard, the kind of place Romney needed to flip some voters, I met Jeff Claykowski, just the sort of voter Romney needed to reclaim—a small business owner (he runs a pet-sitting operation) who voted for George W. Bush before voting for Obama. Didn’t Romney’s attack against Obama’s “you didn’t build that” attack resonate with him? No--he was more bothered by Romney’s 47 percent remarks. “That kind of turned me off,” he said. In general, he was just left uneasy about Romney: “I know a little less about him.” And things are starting to turn around in Ohio, thanks in part to the auto bailout: “If [the auto industry] would’ve gone under, the trickle-down to the suppliers would’ve been bad.” In general: “I don’t want to stop the momentum [of the economic recovery]. I don’t think Romney has a plan.” Also in Hilliard, I spoke with Corey Thomas, 37, for whom things haven’t been going so well. He’s been getting fewer commissions in his job doing inside sales for a book company and almost lost his home to foreclosure. But that didn’t mean he was ready to switch to Romney. “I’m not a huge, giant Obama supporter, but for someone like me, driving a Saturn, he’s better suited to me,” Thomas said. “I see [Romney] being very robotic and slick, and don’t see him helping someone like me.”

Other voters mentioned issues beyond the who’s-on-your-side framing that Obama was also pushing: at the church polling site, Anne Mellinger, a 33-year-old hospital employee, said she was worried about abortion rights and Planned Parenthood funding under Romney, and about the fate of Obamacare, which would help someone like her with a serious preexisting condition—cystic fibrosis—if she was ever without coverage. A 64-year-old woman at the same polling site was most worried about Romney’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher for those now under 55, even if wouldn’t affect her personally; she works in a Medicare office and worries about the ability of seniors to negotiate an array of private insurers. “A lot of these people don’t have the education and resources necessary,” she said. “They’re best with something that’s the same for everyone and there for them.”

But above all, one heard the basic, strikingly class-based point: even if things have not been going so well since 2008, Romney and his party are not for us. The contours of the Obama campaign’s attacks on this front are by now well known—the devastating Bain Capital ads (aired over the attention-getting protests of Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Newark Mayor Cory Booker), the questions about Romney’s tax returns, the assault on his opposition to the auto bailout. Too often overlooked, though, has been the Ohio context that set the stage for the Obama message, the massive backlash last year against Gov. John Kasich’s new law stripping away collective bargaining rights for public employees, which was roundly defeated in a high-turnout referendum last fall. The successful backlash gave Ohio Democrats a shot in the arm after their 2010 wipe-out, persuaded some swing voters that it was time to rethink their support of the GOP—at the state and national level—and gave them an organizational edge heading into this year. “The extremity of last year’s collective bargaining attack opened a lot of eyes to the extremity of the current Republican Party,” said Tim Burga, head of the Ohio AFL-CIO when I ran into him later in the evening. “It created opportunities for us, not only with our own members, but with others as well.”