Mandel, a 35-year-old ex-Marine who has raised more than $20 million through conservative backers, has appalled Ohio’s socially progressive Jews — who are still the clear majority — with an anti-abortion stance that has included calling the Indiana Senate nominee Richard Mourdock a “class act” after Mourdock said pregnancy resulting from rape was “something that God intended to happen” and life was always “a gift from God.”

Oy vey. Does all this matter? Yes it does. It is that close in the Buckeye State. Ohio, with its 18 electoral votes, is about tied, according to most polls. No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio. This is the swing state most likely to swing things. Conservative-backed billboards screaming “Voter fraud is a felony” have prompted the countermessage that, “Voting is a right, not a crime.” Republican intimidation meets Democratic determination.

Obama needs to win big in Cuyahoga County, which includes the strongly Democratic inner city of Cleveland, to carry the state. That is what he did in 2008, gaining 68.5 percent of the vote and winning by a margin of nearly 250,000 votes — enough to secure victory by just over 200,000 votes in Ohio. The Romney campaign reckons that if it can cut Obama’s margin in Cuyahoga to about 175,000 it will take the state.

About 80 percent of Cleveland’s Jews are believed to have voted for Obama last time. Robert Goldberg, former chairman of the United Jewish Communities (now The Jewish Federations of North America) and a Romney supporter, said he believed that number would drop to 60 percent this time. “Jews just don’t trust Obama on Israel,” he told me. “The president has no sympathy for Israel. His sympathy is for the Muslim world he knew as a child.”