airbreadth or vanish altogether, Ohio has emerged as the President's firewall, its 18 electoral votes his best hope of stopping the surging Romney campaign from winning the White House.

Barack Obama speaks in a different dialect when he stops in Ohio, which seems to be every other day now. Even when delivering his basic stump speech, he will aim a few extra Buckeye-friendly zingers at his rival, Mitt Romney. “Does anybody actually look at that guy and think, ‘Man, he’s really into coal’?” the President asked recently at a rally in Athens. “I wasn’t born into fame and fortune,” he continued. “Nobody was picking me–‘Boy, that guy Barack Obama, he’s going to be President someday.'”

On flat screens now from Marietta to Toledo, there is one particularly edgy chord being struck: “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.” That phrase was once used as racial code by Southern segregationists to rouse white voters. Obama uses it to paint Romney as a sort of rich Uncle Pennybags, defined by his Cayman Islands holdings, a Swiss bank account and his opposition to Obama’s auto-industry bailout. “We won’t take your vast business advice,” Obama thunders at his rival on the stump.

Obama once decried such tactics as a relic of the past, but one need only look at the polls to see why he has dusted them off for 2012. As his margins in swing states shrink to a hairbreadth or vanish altogether, Ohio has emerged as the President’s firewall, its 18 electoral votes his best hope of stopping the surging Romney campaign from winning the White House. It’s a familiar role for the state that has voted for the winning candidate in 27 of the past 29 presidential elections. Obama’s Chicago operation is well aware of the tradition: no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio.

A new Ohio poll for TIME by Abt SRBI shows that Romney still has a ways to go with just two weeks remaining. Among those who have already voted and those who are likely to vote, Obama holds a clear advantage, winning 49%