According to the reigning narrative in Boston these days, the entire Obama campaign has been built on a miscalculation: Team Obama believed the way to win was to cast Mitt Romney as a soulless plutocrat; it spent hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours driving that point home. But the only thing all that spending and mau-mauing brought them was a caricature of Romney so fragile it promptly collapsed when the country finally got a look at who he really was. “[Romney] wiped out millions of dollars in attack ads portraying Mitt Romney as a rich guy from Bain Capital,” John McCain said of the debates, channeling the view from Romneyland.

There’s clearly something to this storyline, at least judging from October’s polls. As recently as late September, Americans' unfavorable views of Romney outweighed their favorable views of him by 4-5 percentage points. Today, more people view him favorably than unfavorably. If Obama loses on Tuesday, Democrats will be right to wonder if Chicago made the wrong call on the biggest strategic question it faced.

But ever since the Denver debate, where Republicans first conjured up this story, it has suffered from a potentially devastating flaw: Ohio. Even as Obama’s lead shriveled in other key states, like Florida and Virginia, the losses were smaller in Ohio, where his margin was larger to begin with. The RealClearPolitics polling average, the choice barometer of Republicans, shows Obama coughing up 5.2 percentage points in Virginia since his September peak and 4.4 points in Florida, but only 3.3 in Ohio. Ohio is the only one of the three where RCP shows Obama ahead as of this writing.

What explains this? It would seem to be that most exotic of political specimens, the working-class Ohio voter. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Obama strategy wasn’t designed to win states like Florida and Virginia, which would have produced an Electoral College wipe-out. It was designed to secure just enough votes to eke out a victory (perhaps with a small cushion). And to do that, the only swing state the campaign really needed to focus on was Ohio, which Obama carried by 4 points in 2008 (compared with the 7 points by which he trumped John McCain nationally).

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