With lukewarm job growth and Mitt Romney ready to fight, President Barack Obama faces a smaller crowd when he returns to Richmond, Virginia.
Barack Obama greets supporters during a rally at the Richmond Coliseum in 2008
When Senator Barack Obama came to Richmond four years ago, Rio Bridges dropped everything. Then 25, he queued for four hours in the freezing cold to claim one of 13,000 spots in the city's Coliseum. "It felt like you just couldn't miss it," Mr Bridges remembers. "We were making history".
While another 6,000 shivered outside, Mr Obama entered the amphitheatre to an ear-splitting roar. As flashbulbs popped and teenagers screamed, he declared: "You and I – together – will change this country and change this world". To Mr Bridges, "there was electricity in the building – I'll never forget it".
Yet this 29-year-old music producer will not be among the crowds when Mr Obama comes back to this American city of 200,000 people, some 110 miles south of the White House, to officially launch his re-election campaign this morning [SATURDAY]. "I'm kinda busy," he said.
As the fresh-faced political rock star of 2008 begins touring his difficult second album, many of the fans who made him Virginia's first Democratic choice for president in 44 years – by a remarkable seven-point margin – seem similarly lukewarm about a candidate who concedes that he is "a little greyer now".
This time, Mr Obama will address a crowd half as big, in a "multi-purpose indoor facility" that next week hosts a graduation ceremony for a nearby school for social workers. His wife, Michelle, whose approval ratings drastically outstrip his own, will be there to lend some much-needed extra glamour.
Republicans are ready to pounce. "You have to admit that four years ago he was exciting," said Cortland Putbrese, chairman of Richmond GOP. "But now people have seen him in action for years, they are disenchanted". Membership rolls have doubled since Mr Obama's inauguration, Mr Putbrese claims, and 2008 Obama voters are defecting.
In places like this, that could spell trouble. Alongside perennially tight battlegrounds Florida and Ohio, Virginia has taken on an outsized importance in the campaign. Its 13 electoral college votes could end up deciding whether Mr Obama is returned to the White House or evicted by Mitt Romney, his presumed Republican challenger.
Mr Obama currently leads the former Massachusetts governor here by an average of 3.2 per cent, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregate. But conservatives are bullish about closing this gap as their candidate – bogged down until recently in a messy party primary – hits his stride and gets out his message.
The reason is the same as everywhere else: America's economic pain has barely relented for more than 40 months. Official figures yesterday showed 115,000 new jobs were created in April – hardly enough to keep up with population growth. Unemployment fell slightly to 8.1 per cent, but only because tens of thousands of jobless Americans were not counted because they had given up looking.
Mr Romney, a former private equity boss and Winter Olympics chief worth $250 million (£160 million), promises that he is the chief executive to steer the US out of the doldrums.
"Obama spoke a good game on the economy and then made health care reform his number one priority. It's been a disaster," said Pete Snyder, the Republicans' Victory Chairman for the state. "People are going to vote based on their pocketbooks".
To Stanley Greenberg, the veteran pollster who advised Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the sputtering recovery presents Mr Obama with a different challenge to transatlantic incumbents on the centre-Left who also found themselves struggling to recreate the idealistic waves of excitement that swept them to power.
"For Clinton in 1996, the economy was on the way up, and he could run on hope and crossing the bridge to the 21st century," said Mr Greenberg. By 2001 Tony Blair had fostered "disillusionment and loss of trust", but thanks to the steady boom, "they were poised for a different trajectory".
Instead, Mr Obama has little choice but to plea with American voters that things could be worse. "We've spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after other folks' messes," he told a fund-raiser last week. Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser, summarised Mr Romney's campaign as: "You didn't clean up our mess fast enough".
The President's salvation may be that Mr Romney, driven hard to the Right on social issues by his primary opponents, faces yawning deficits among women, young people and Hispanics. And while Mr Obama's star may have slipped, his opponent appears determined to remain a charisma vacuum. Perhaps, however, that is the order of the day.
"I'm not saying people are going to saw off their right arm to vote Mitt Romney," conceded Mr Snyder, the Republican chairman. "But we are in dire straits. Are you going to go for the guy you still want to hang out with, or the guy you'd never have a beer with but who is a turnaround man, when America needs a turnaround?"
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