Mitt Romney was circling campaign wagons yesterday for a desperate “last stand” in Michigan, his birthplace and a state that he must win on Tuesday to get his Republican presidential run back on track. He has pulled advertisements from other looming battle-grounds in South Carolina and Florida to concentrate his firepower on the presidential primary in Michigan.

After spending vast sums of his multimillion-dollar personal fortune to establish early poll leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, he has been left with two disappointing second place finishes – or “silver medals”, as the former Winter Olympics chief prefers to describe them. The former Massachusetts Governor has since sought to dispel the gloom gathering around his White House prospects by circulating a campaign memo claiming that his roots in Michigan, combined with a superior organisation, give him a head start in Tuesday’s primary.

In a series of campaign appearances across the state Mr Romney has been emphasising that the ailing industrial bases in Michigan, which include the “Motor City” of Detroit, are “personal to me because it’s where I was born and raised”. At an event in Grand Rapids he talked at length about his father, George, the former Governor of Michigan, whose campaign slogan had been getting the state “on the move again”. Earlier he took a leaf from Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire manual, reportedly “choking up” on mention of his late father’s name. “He was a great man and I miss him dearly,” Mr Romney said.

Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucuses last week, has been broadcasting TV adverts in Michigan that emphasise his blue-collar appeal as he takes aim at Mr Romney’s business background in a state with burgeoning unemployment. Voters want a president who reminds them “of the guy they work with, not the guy that laid them off”, Mr Huckabee said.

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Although Michigan has a sizeable Evangelical vote, a core constituency for Mr Huckabee, advisers believe his best chance of securing a second win to be in South Carolina, where Republicans vote on January 19.

John McCain hopes to repeat his success in 2000, when he scored back-to-back wins in New Hampshire and Michigan. He has also been addressing Michigan’s crippled economy but, in true “straight talking” fashion, makes no secret of his support for higher fuel-mileage standards for cars – a measure opposed by much of the state’s motor-manufacturing industry and workforce. Instead, he said, Michigan “is the place to do the technology to make us energy-independent – we’re going to have to invest the money to have the kind of technology to meet those standards”.

Mr McCain is dividing his effort between Michigan and South Carolina, which he lost in 2000 to George W. Bush after a famously bitter battle that featured false claims that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman. He was in South Carolina yesterday, where older supporters have formed a “truth squad” to respond to any attacks on him.

The 71-year-old Arizona Senator still faces opposition from right-wing Republicans over his support for giving illegal immigrants a pathway to US citizenship, as well as trouble from the South Carolina’s religious conservatives, whose leaders he denounced as “agents of intolerance” in 2000.

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