Mitt Romney campaigned at the Ariel Corporation, which makes compressors, in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on Wednesday. He was joined at the company by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
BOSTON — Inside Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters over the past few days, the data pouring in was unmistakable. Aides scouring the results of focus groups and national polls found that undecided voters watching the presidential debate in Denver seemed startled when the Republican candidate portrayed all year by Democrats — the ultraconservative, unfeeling capitalist — did not materialize.
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Workers in Mount Vernon, Ohio, listened to Mitt Romney speak Wednesday. Romney aides are weighing a shift in strategy.
The voters, they discovered, consistently reserved their highest marks for moments when Mr. Romney sounded bipartisan and moderate, two themes he has long played down on the campaign trail but seemed to take pains to showcase this week with centrist-sounding statements on taxes, abortion and immigration.
But the appearance at this late stage of a modulating Mitt Romney risks reopening a long-running debate about his authenticity, given that he has described himself as “severely conservative,” dismissed 47 percent of voters as government dependent, and picked a bold conservative as his running mate.
Behind the new efforts by the Romney campaign to soften his conservative edges and showcase his personal story was a realization by his political team — borne out by reactions to his performance at the debate — that with the economy showing improvement their best shot at victory is to aggressively defy the negative perceptions that have dogged him throughout the race.
In interviews, those advisers described a strategy to capitalize on Mr. Romney’s upswing in the final stretch by highlighting his record of bipartisanship, his time as governor of Massachusetts and history of personal generosity — relying on television advertising, appearances by high-profile supporters and speeches by the candidate himself.
Russ Schriefer, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said that four years ago Obama voters “liked the idea of him being a bipartisan president.”
“And just because they’ve given up on him,” he said, “they haven’t given up on the idea of someone being bipartisan and working across the aisle to get things done.”
How aggressively the campaign will pursue this approach on the campaign trail and over the airwaves is an open question. Since the debate, Mr. Romney has not entirely remade his stump speech to emphasize those messages. And the commercials released by the campaign on Wednesday focused on the economy, not bipartisanship as governor — a notion that some Massachusetts lawmakers hotly dispute.
What they are envisioning represents a high-stakes wager that voters can be persuaded by a version of Mr. Romney that they have scarcely seen — a version that is, in many ways, at odds with how Mr. Romney campaigned throughout the Republican primary season, when he emphasized his conservatism on social and economic issues.
The perils of such a shift became evident on Wednesday when conservatives expressed wariness about remarks in which Mr. Romney seemed to again muddle his position on abortion. In an interview with the editorial board of The Des Moines Register, which has supported abortion rights and usually endorses Democrats in general elections, Mr. Romney said, “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”
Steve Deace, a conservative radio host in Iowa, told listeners on Wednesday, “I’m running out of fingers and toes to count the number of positions he has taken on abortion.”
The Obama campaign pounced. It accused Mr. Romney, who has previously said he would like to see the Supreme Court overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, of “cynically and dishonestly” misleading voters about his views on abortion.
Mr. Romney’s aides said he was responding to a specific question about his agenda in Congress, not a broader inquiry about abortion. Even so, they felt compelled to quickly assure religious conservatives that his position had not changed, reaching out to leaders like Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an advocacy group that vigorously opposes abortion.
By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Romney told reporters after a campaign event in Ohio: “I’m a pro-life candidate. I’ll be a pro-life president.”
Mr. Romney set off similar confusion last week when he declared that he would not cancel two-year deportation deferrals for illegal immigrants granted by the Obama administration, a position that distanced him from conservative orthodoxy.
But a few days later, his campaign clarified that Mr. Romney intended to halt the program after he took office and would not issue any new deferrals.
The changes are sometimes subtle. Mr. Romney, who has long extolled the virtues of two-parent families, offered words of praise for single mothers at a rally in Ohio on Wednesday, including them in a list of people “who live for things bigger than ourselves.”
The Romney campaign, which once winced at the mere suggestion that he had changed a position and hounded journalists who used the word “flip-flop,” seemed largely unbothered by claims that he is reorienting himself for a general election audience.
“Those concerns have receded,” said Gary Marx, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a former Romney counselor on conservative issues. “He is being intentional about reaching out to a broader cross-section of voters on these issues.”
He added: “He is delivering multiple messages to different groups. That is a sophisticated campaign at work late in the game.”
The strategy is both a reaction to a changing campaign landscape and the fruit of long-running internal debates over how to sell Mr. Romney to a sometimes skeptical electorate. After a year of focusing relentlessly on President’s Obama’s stewardship of the economy, and resisting pressure to offer a three-dimensional portrait of Mr. Romney as a father, husband, businessman and governor, the campaign realized that it needed to switch gears.
The Obama campaign had filled the void through advertising and news releases, leaving many voters with strongly negative views of Mr. Romney by the time he became the Republican nominee.
The new approach was trotted out haltingly at first and was overwhelmed for a time by a leaked video of Mr. Romney talking about “47 percent” of voters who do not pay taxes. But it finally seemed to break through during the first presidential debate.
Republican political operatives said there was already proof in the polls that playing up Mr. Romney’s inclination toward pragmatism and problem-solving is resonating with voters.
“Barack Obama has been out there for months saying that Mitt Romney is this scary beast that will eat your children and throw Grandma out in the snow,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican operative who worked for Mr. Romney in 2008 but is not aligned with any candidate this year. “And all of a sudden this very practical businessman showed up in the debates, and he’s just not the guy Obama has been painting.”
