President Obama has been campaigning almost non-stop since Labor Day, but his political fortunes have hardly improved. Obama’s September blitz through swing states, backed up with an aggressive media schedule, has apparently yielded little for the embattled incumbent.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Obama dragging a 42 percent job-approval rating in Ohio and already evenly matched by Republican frontrunners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney in the all-important Buckeye State, where Obama has campaigned twice in three weeks.

And so it is across the states where Obama has focused his efforts in this first round of campaigning.

In Ohio and neighboring Pennsylvania, 51 percent of voters said Obama didn’t deserve a second term. In Virginia, the lynchpin to Obama’s 2012 strategy, a Roanoke College poll found the president with a 39 percent rating. In North Carolina, the great Obama success story of 2008, a High Point University poll finds the president with a 41 percent job-approval rating...