PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — The Republican ticket has all but taken up residence in vital Ohio: Mitt Romney spent four days in the state this week and Representative Paul D. Ryan two, with plans to return Monday.
Ohio, which two weeks ago seemed to be slipping from Mr. Romney's grasp, has become a tighter contest, according to polls released late last week. The Republicans' barnstorming was in response to state leaders who pressed Mr. Romney to help turn out voters.
As Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan charted separate paths on Saturday, they tailored messages to each region — Mr. Ryan promising a return of manufacturing in the industrial northeast, Mr. Romney defending coal jobs on the banks of the Ohio River in the south.
Mr. Romney, who has never drawn the throngs typical of President Obama's — 15,000 turned out to hear the president at Ohio State University early last week — has seen his crowds swell to some of the largest of his campaign, and he aimed an offhand barb at Mr. Obama on Saturday. "His campaign is about smaller and smaller things and our campaign is about bigger and bigger crowds," Mr. Romney said at an outdoor rally on the campus of Shawnee State University.
In Portsmouth, on the western edge of Ohio coal country, Mr. Romney raised an attack that the Obama administration threatens jobs and energy independence by excessive environmental regulation. "We've got 250 years of coal; it could be burned cleanly," he said. "This president, when he was running for office, said if you want to build a new coal plant you can — but if you do, you'll go bankrupt."
In the same speech, he attacked the president for directing $90 billion in government support to "green energy companies," but called for a local uranium enrichment plant to have "the most modern technology."
The plant, American Centrifuge, has sought a $2 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, which has balked, although it provided $88 million this year.
Mr. Ryan appeared in Youngstown, an industrial city once known for its steel mills, where he focused on how a Romney White House would help support manufacturing. He said the country had lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs since Mr. Obama was elected.
"You know, we come from similar areas," Mr. Ryan said. "Please know we want to get these manufacturing jobs back here. We want to make sure that this is a country and society where we are the envy of the world, where we're No. 1 in manufacturing again, not second to China like we are right now."
(Although it is true there are fewer manufacturing jobs since the president took office, more than 500,000 have been added since February 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a reversal of decades of slow decline.)
Mr. Ryan, who spoke to supporters at Youngstown State University, used a PowerPoint presentation to lament the rising national debt and ticked off a list of manufacturing plants that had closed in his home state of Wisconsin, including a General Motors plant in Janesville, his hometown.
"We know what it's like to lose manufacturing jobs," Mr. Ryan said. "We know what it's like when the factories that provided great livelihoods for generations are gone."
Mr. Ryan has been criticized by fact-checkers for suggesting Mr. Obama was somehow responsible for the plant's closing, since it largely shut down in December 2008, before the president took office. During his campaign that year, Mr. Obama promised to pursue policies to save plants like Janesville. Although he bailed out the auto industry, over Mr. Romney's objections, the plant in Mr. Ryan's hometown remains closed.
Mr. Ryan missed no opportunity to emphasize his local ties. When a college student told him that he had risen at 5 a.m. to drive to Youngstown from Akron, Mr. Ryan responded that he also attended college in Ohio, at Miami University. The mention of the college drew an enthusiastic cheer from the crowd.
Mr. Ryan then told the student that one of his best friends was from Akron, noting that Goodyear had a plant there, and adding that he had visited several times.
"It's a great town," he said, "and it reminds me so much of where I come from. It really does."
Afterward, Mr. Ryan stopped with his wife and children at a nearby soup kitchen. The family put on aprons and washed several large pans, though they did not appear to need washing, according to a pool reporter. There also was no one to serve at the soup kitchen, as breakfast had ended.
Meanwhile, the Romney campaign took aim at another local issue in a radio ad that said the administration wanted to "to take away one of the most vital weapons in our arsenal — made right here in Ohio."
The ad aired in northwest Ohio, around Lima, home of the plant that makes the M-1 tank. At the vice-presidential debate on Thursday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the Army was not seeking any more M-1's; instead, he said, "what we need is more U.A.V.'s," or drones.
Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney appeared together on Friday evening in Lancaster, a picturesque community in central Ohio, where their outdoor rally took place as the sun set and thousands amassed downtown.
It turned out there was a very local angle as well. "It's good to be back," Mr. Romney said. "And you may say, 'I don't remember seeing you here before.' But I was here a long time ago."
He explained "my very first assignment at my first job" as a consultant fresh out of Harvard Business School was to work with a local company, Anchor Hocking, which makes glass tableware. He recalled "standing next to those big glass furnaces" and learning about "triple gob machines" at the glassworks.
"It's good to be back," he said, acknowledging the timeless truth that all politics — M-1 tanks or glass casseroles — is local.
Trip Gabriel reported from Portsmouth, and Thomas Kaplan from Youngstown, Ohio.
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