AT THE bar at Simeri’s Old Town Tap, a watering hole on the outskirts of South Bend, a down-on-its-luck manufacturing town, conversation turns to Bill Clinton. One regular, appalled by the prospect of voting for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, is thinking of writing the former president’s name on his ballot. Locals dislike Mr Obama’s stance on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, explains Brendan Mullen, the Democratic candidate for the area’s seat in Congress. But they are only slightly more enthusiastic about Mr Romney, who reminds them of the absentee executives who show up at the factories where they work to announce lay-offs and closures.

South Bend, Indiana, is typical in many ways of the largely white, working-class towns across the Midwest which will help to determine the outcome of the election. It was the home of Studebaker, a carmaker that went out of business in the 1960s, and is dominated to this day by the firm’s vast, semi-derelict factory and headquarters. In the surrounding residential neighbourhoods stand plenty of boarded-up houses. The city has a dynamic young mayor, and has succeeded in attracting some technology firms. Notre Dame University is just up the road. But unemployment, which peaked at 14.3% in 2010, stood at 11.1% in August, far above the national average. Just to the east, in Elkhart, “the RV capital of the world”, unemployment rose to an awful 22.3% in 2009 before falling back to 10.8%.

The area’s voters are fickle. They are represented in Congress by Joe Donnelly, a pro-life, fiscally conservative Democrat. But the district has swung between Democrats and Republicans for decades, and Mr Mullen is the underdog this year. South Bend plumped for George Bush in 2004, but opted for Mr Obama in 2008, when he became the first Democrat to carry Indiana since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Elkhart remained in the Republican column in both years. This year Mr Romney is heavily favoured to win the state, in part by making up lost ground in places like South Bend.

Nationally, working-class whites, once the majority of the electorate, accounted for just 39% of voters in 2008. They also used to be convinced Democrats, but have been drifting into the Republican column by fits and starts since the election of Richard Nixon. They favoured John McCain over Mr Obama by 18 points. This year polls show them preferring Mr Romney by even larger margins: 25 points, for example, according to recent NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys.

This image of a rout, however, is misleading, because it conceals big regional and demographic differences. In August, when Mr Obama had an overall lead in the polls, the Public Religion Research Institute found Mr Romney ahead by 13 points among white working-class voters. But that was thanks almost entirely to an enormous lead in the South, of 40 points—in states where the outcome is not remotely in doubt. In the north-east and West, Mr Romney’s lead was only marginal, and in the crucial Midwest, where many of the battleground states lie, he was eight points behind Mr Obama. By the same token, Mr Romney enjoys a huge advantage among both male and Protestant working-class voters, according to the PRRI, but only a narrow edge among Catholics and is level-pegging among women. Most notably, only a minority of all white working-class voters had a favourable opinion of either man, whereas 61% still think highly of Mr Clinton.

The PRRI found that social issues are much more significant for working-class voters in the South, a majority of whom own guns and strongly object to gay marriage. That tends to diminish the chances of them voting for Mr Obama, who recently said that he supports gay marriage, and who is the butt of endless criticism from the National Rifle Association. But in the manufacturing cities of the Great Lakes region, many of which have a strong union tradition that does not exist in the South, the prime concerns are far more likely to be the economic dislocation caused by automation and globalisation. Northern Indiana lies somewhere between the two, with many devout voters who are employed by struggling manufacturers.

The Midwest and the rest

Mr Obama has courted the working class in the Midwest assiduously. He came to Elkhart in 2009 to promote the stimulus bill, arguing it would blunt the spike in the city’s unemployment. He never holds a campaign rally without pointing out that he supported a government-funded bail-out of the car industry and Mr Romney did not. He also talks up his plans to increase taxes on the wealthy and to make it harder to ship jobs overseas—ideas that go down well with working-class voters.

These arguments seem to be working for Mr Obama in Michigan and Ohio, which have lots of jobs in the car industry and where he remains ahead, albeit very narrowly in the latter (see article). But Mr Romney remains the favourite in places like Kokomo, 90 miles south of South Bend, despite its near-total reliance on three Chrysler factories. White working-class voters in the area, says one local Democrat, are suspicious of government meddling, even when it works to their advantage. Moreover, the decline in their economic prospects over recent decades has stoked a broader anxiety about the economy. They are uncomfortable both with the big deficits Mr Obama has racked up, he says, and with his health-care reforms, which they fear might bring greater hardship in the long run.

That squares with PRRI’s finding that most white working-class voters do not see the federal government as working for them. They are resentful of big corporations and of immigration and gloomy about the future. It does not help that neither Mr Romney nor Mr Obama is much good at backslapping, but in the circumstances in which the 2012 election is being fought, any candidate would have a hard time winning them over. Except, of course, Bill Clinton.