NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio — Rev. Bob Montague, 58, is one of Ohio’s most sought-after residents these days: In an increasingly tight presidential race in this deciding state, he’s one of the few undecided voters left.
Over the past four years, Montague has seen his fortunes — and the fortunes of many in his Lutheran congregation — decline. He believes the system is broken.
He also believes “you can break it worse.”
Montague worked as a truck driver for 42 years and, with his second wife, raised a blended family of 12 children — six are in the military, one is a police officer. In 1987, Montague was in an on-the-job accident that resulted in a debilitating spinal injury, but he kept working until 2005, when he was forced to go on permanent disability.
That same year, after refinancing his mortgage with just 10 years to go, he and his wife lost their home. His teeth, he says, are breaking, but he can’t afford to go to the dentist.
“It’s really not that bad,” Montague says. Worse than the injuries, the foreclosure and the worry over bills, he says, was having to go on public assistance.
“I worked for 42 years,” he says. “I was embarrassed to have to go down and ask for things.” He has seen his congregants lose their jobs, have to show up at church for meals, run out of unemployment and rely on charity.
Whom do they blame?
“They blame the government in general,” he says. “Not necessarily Obama.”
Montague’s friend and next-door-neighbor, 39-year-old Jen Adams, is also undecided, and, as with Montague, the past four years have been difficult.
Her husband died, leaving her to raise her now-12-year-old son. (She has just remarried.) Her home dropped in value by about $15,000. She hasn’t lost her job as a medical assistant, something that seemed quite possible just a year ago.
“My life hasn’t improved at all,” Adams says, though this actually makes her feel “very fortunate. I know that almost all of our patients lost their jobs at some point. We tried to work with them, but our business took a hit.”
In the 2008 presidential election, for the first time in her life, Adams voted for a Democrat.
“I thought, ‘I’m open to change! I’ll see what happens!’ ” She laughs softly. “And what do you know? Nothing’s changed. I’ll vote, but I don’t think it makes a damn bit of difference.”
And yet, the irony — if any vote counts, it’s hers. Perhaps more than any other voter in America.
Ohio has helped tip a candidate to victory in every election since 1964, often in tight races. The closest margin here in modern history was 1948: Truman won the state by a mere 7,107 votes.
Both candidates stumped here just last Tuesday: the president in Columbus, Mitt Romney in Cuyahoga Falls. Yesterday, Romney held three “victory rallies,” in Lancaster, Portsmouth and Lebanon. This Thursday, Obama is pulling out the big guns: Bruce Springsteen will rally voters in Parma, with Bill Clinton as his opening act.
“Ohio is a real purple state,” says Grant Neeley, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton. “It’s a knife edge.”
Part of the state’s importance, of course, is due to the Electoral College (the state carries 18 votes), but much of it is attributable to the curious complexion of the Buckeye State itself.
“It’s not a northern state, it’s on the edge of the Midwest, it has an industrial heritage and a little bit of Appalachia,” Neeley says. Ethnically and economically, he adds, “it’s a good microcosm of the United States.”
As of 10 days ago, 10 percent of voters here were undecided. By this past week, in the wake of Obama’s disastrous performance in his first debate with Romney, that number was cut in half; the latest Real Clear Politics poll average has the two in a virtual tie in Ohio, with Obama at 47.6 percent and Romney at 46.3 percent.
And what Florida was to the 2000 election, Ohio will be to 2012. As of Friday, polling whiz Nate Silver ranked Ohio by a wide margin as the most likely state to decide the 2012 election — by 44 percent, compared to Virginia at 13.9 percent.
Most unnerving to Team Romney: No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. And many of those Ohioans who want to be swayed by him remain unconvinced.
“I’m a registered Democrat, and the only thing that bothers me is the job scene,” says Suzanne Durette, 35. (She is employed as an administrator.) “I think Obama and Romney are both speaking to the middle class, and there are a whole lot of people who are lower middle class.”
Durette first listened to Romney speak at the Republican national convention, and she was impressed — to a point. “I thought, ‘He sounds like he really cares.’ Do I trust it? No, not at all.”
Her friend Amy Foley, 37, is also undecided. “I watched the debate, and I think Romney did better,” she says. She’s leaning “60-40” toward Romney; her husband, she says, is solidly Obama.
“I still don’t know,” she says.
Durette and Foley — like Montague and Adams — are residents of Cuyahoga County, the most populous in the state. (There are slightly over 1.2 million residents). According to the 2010 Census, the racial and ethnic make-up is fairly mixed, with 63.6 percent white, 29.7 percent African-American, 16.5 percent German, and 4.8 percent Latino. The median household income is slightly above $43,000, and this county has voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1976 — and when a Republican last won the county, in 1972, it was by a very slim margin (Richard Nixon got 49.94 percent of the vote to George McGovern’s 48.15 percent).
“Cuyahoga goes Democrat in pretty good numbers,” Neeley says. “But if you’re a Democrat and you’re running, you need to get as many numbers out of the Northeast” — where Cuyahoga is — “as you can. The question is: Are they mobilizing the core? Are they mobilizing the base?”
For all that is made of super-desirable undecided voters, it’s worth noting that 21 percent of them admit that they don’t pay attention to the news or the election — a truism that “Saturday Night Live” recently spoofed with mock undecideds: “Before you get our vote, you’re going to have to answer some questions. Questions like, when is the election? Who is the president right now?”
Several undecided Ohioans admitted that they had little to no idea about the positions of either candidate. “I don’t pay attention because life is so stressful,” says assistant manager Christina Asimov, 54. “Bills pile up — you don’t have time.” She says she’d like to vote for someone “who can help the middle class, less taxes, more jobs — who is that person? I don’t know.”
Neither does Greg Chapman, 35, who works as a dialysis technician. He voted for McCain in ’08 because “he had a little more experience,” but doesn’t watch TV or read the newspaper. He knows that Romney’s numbers have spiked since the debate, but when asked what he would need to hear to pull the lever for either candidate, he pauses. “That’s a good question,” he says. “I don’t know.”
Running right behind voter apathy — at least among the undecideds who spoke with The Post — is a deep sense of cynicism. “I didn’t vote four years ago because I didn’t like either candidate,” says Elaine Sarris, co-owner of the Sidewalk Cafe in Painseville, in neighboring Lake County. This time, “I’m considering it. But if I can’t decide, I won’t vote.”
“I think both sides start out with great ideas, but the system is broken,” says Jen Adams. “And they always go back to: The person before me did it. For crying out loud — you all did it!”