A new word - "change" - suddenly became the Republican presidential contender's central message as he swept across the all-important battleground state of Ohio yesterday.
At one campaign stop in the state that Mr Romney almost certainly must win if he is to take the presidency from Barack Obama, the word change rated at least a dozen mentions.
"We need to make sure Ohio is able to send a message loud and clear," the Republican told a cheering crowd in Cincinnati. "We want real change. We want big change."
The word also featured prominently at stops in Worthington and Defiance.
Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio who helped coach Mr Romney for this month's presidential debates, added another familiar byword when introducing the candidate: he told a campaign audience that Mr Romney would "bring back hope".
The presidential election has reached the gritty late stage of trying to lock-in undecided voters.
Even if it means borrowing slogans from his opponent's 2008 election campaign, Mr Romney is willing to apply anything that works.
New tracking polls by The Washington Post/ABC News and Gallup both show the Republican has a three-point lead over Mr Obama among likely voters, ahead 50 to 47 per cent.
But the path to election victory will ultimately depend on the ground campaign in a clutch of states such as Ohio, where Mr Obama still retains majority support and appears to be benefiting most from early voting.
There was another familiar ring to Mr Romney's words yesterday - straight out of the Obama 2008 election campaign script - when the former Bain Capital chief executive and one-term Massachusetts governor indicated he wanted to do things differently if elected.
"It's time for a big change - to draw on the quality of the American heart, to come together, Republicans and Democrats, to finally reach across the partisan divide and reach a place where we come together for the American people," he said.
Democrats scratched their heads: didn't this sound much like an echo of their man?
Mr Romney needs to aim for the political centre, but his push for change and call for bipartisan support has a distinctly conservative hue. The Republican wants Mr Obama's party to accept his proposals for lowering taxes, reducing the size of government, easing regulations for business and Wall Street banks, cutting the budget deficit and debt, overturning new health laws and limiting entitlements.
The Obama camp, hearing its own campaign-speak turned inside out, hit back yesterday.
Campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said Mr Romney's election would not bring change, just failed policies of the Bush administration "that crashed the economy and devastated the middle class in the first place".
And so Ms Smith read from the revised Obama script: she said Mr Romney would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for the tax breaks of millionaires and billionaires, and let Wall Street write its own rules again.
"And what's worse is that we know he'd be nothing but a rubber stamp for the right wing in the White House," she said.
Mr Romney could not be trusted as president, Ms Smith said, if he could not stand up to Grover Norquist, an anti-tax lobbyist who has scored pledges from almost all Republicans to never raise taxes, and Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate candidate from Indiana who this week opposed abortion in all circumstances because pregnancy resulting from rape was "something that God intended to happen".
Are the good people of Ohio listening to the political noise? It is certainly difficult for them to escape the deluge of visiting candidates and election ads. No doubt Mr Obama will be back soon.
What is clear is that Ohio's 18 state-based electoral college votes could make the difference as both candidates reach for an overall target of 270 needed to clinch the presidency. While saying he disagreed with Mr Mourdock's view on rape, Mr Romney declined to elaborate yesterday in the face of repeated questions. He also declined to dissociate himself from an ad in which he appears with Mr Mourdock.
Mr Obama, meanwhile, took an opportunity to appeal to women voters during an interview on NBC when asked about Mr Mourdock's comments, and the distinction made by other Republicans that abortion was acceptable only in cases of "legitimate rape" or "forceable rape".
"Let me be very clear," Mr Obama said. "These attempts to redefine rape make no sense to me, and I don't think they make much sense to the vast majority of women across the country. But more broadly, I think that what these episodes point to is the fact that you don't want politicians, the majority of them male, making a series of decisions about women's health issues."
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