No Republican presidential candidate has ever captured victory without the help of Ohio. Mitt Romney's road to continuing that trend was hit with another uphill poll on Sunday.

A Columbus Dispatch survey shows the former Massachusetts governor trailing President Barack Obama by nine points, 51 percent to 42 percent. The Dispatch notes that this is the fifth recent poll showing Romney trailing by at least five points in the Buckeye State.
The Dispatch poll was conducted from Sept. 19-29, pulling in responses from a crop of 1,662 random voters, with a 2.2 percent margin of error. September's numbers show a stark contrast from August's Dispatch data, which had Obama and Romney knotted at 45 percent apiece right before the start of the Republican National Convention.
Romney took his pitch to Ohio this past week, with tax policy at the forefront of his speech to middle-class voters. The GOP hopeful has been fighting a fierce battle from a time perspective on the ground. His first Ohio office opened this past June, while Obama has had held a five-year presence in the state, dating back to his 2008 presidential run.
HuffPost's Ohio presidential pollster trend chart, which fuses together a lineup of publicly available data, shows Obama on the upswing. Since Sept. 1, the president has widened his lead to more than six percentage points.
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