Romney's problem: Ohio, Ohio, Ohio

Of all the hurdles in Mitt Romney’s path, there is none as daunting – or as alarming to other members of his party – as the state of Ohio.

This morning’s Washington Post poll found Obama leading Romney by 8 points in the Buckeye State. That’s on the high end of recent margins, but the trend is unambiguously in the president’s favor: Obama was up 5 in an Ohio Newspaper Organization poll, up 4 in a Purple Strategies poll, and up 7 in a Fox News poll and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College Poll. That’s all in the last two weeks.

Romney can win the White House while losing Ohio, but it’s hard to overstate how difficult that would be. If you play around with POLITICO’s swing-state map, you’ll find that if Obama wins Ohio and holds Wisconsin and Nevada (he is currently favored in all three states) Romney can pick up Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire – and still lose.

Ohio isn’t the only reason why national Republicans are so pessimistic about Romney’s campaign right now, but it is one of the big reasons, and it’s why the Romney campaign’s continued references to national tracking polls are wide of the mark. Even if Romney managed to move the national campaign 2 to 3 points in his direction, it would probably leave him short of a win unless he improved his position in Ohio by a bigger margin.

And the reality is, the trajectory of the race in Ohio has been set in place for a while. When I wrote in August about the state of the campaign there, Romney was persistently down a few points and had allowed Obama to claim a populist space in the race that Ohio Democrats have exploited effectively since the 2010 elections. That hasn’t changed in the last month.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: none of that means that Romney can’t win. What it does mean is that unless he changes the race in Ohio meaningfully and soon, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for Romney to win nationally. In the event Romney becomes president, his turnaround in Ohio will likely be one of the big stories of the last six weeks of the campaign.

Romney will be in Ohio tonight with Paul Ryan for the start of a multi-day bus tour there. Team Romney’s hope is that they can tighten the race to just a couple of points heading into the first debate, and then make up the rest of the difference through a combination of strong debate performances and a robust field operation. Which is similar to their game plan everywhere, except the stakes are higher in Ohio.