When Mitt Romney wanted to visit the house in Palmer Woods, Detroit, where he spent his early years, he was told that it was boarded up because of a mortgage foreclosure. “Really, that’s too bad,” the Republican presidential candidate said. “We’ve got to stop the spread of decay.”

His presidential primary campaign over the past week has become a journey into his past, never missing an opportunity to remind voters that he grew up in Michigan, where his father was an American Motors Corporation chief and popular state Governor.

In traversing the grey expanse of this economically depressed state, a Republican candidate often ridiculed as the master of the spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation has transformed himself into an angry agent of change.

Standing outside a General Motors factory in Ypsilanti, where 200 redundancies had just been announced, he asked: “Where does it stop? Is there a point at which someone says: ‘Enough’? Are we going to allow the entire domestic automotive manufacturing industry to disappear?” Mr Romney says that it breaks his heart to see the industrial decline of Michigan, where there has been an estimated 300,000 job losses since 2000.

Speaking in Taylor, a Detroit suburb, on Sunday night, he earned knowing laughter for a nostalgic anecdote about the 1962 tail-finned Rambler car — and then raucous applause for promising to bring back the good times by fighting for every job in a carmaking industry that was once the “envy of the world”.

The former Massachusetts Governor desperately needs a win in Michigan tonight if he is to rekindle his White House run after two disappointing second-placed finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Cynics may suggest that his concern for a declining manufacturing base has more to do with the pivotal importance of the election to him than any roots remaining in a state that he left more than 40 years ago to build a multimillion-dollar fortune.

In contrast to his speeches of previous weeks, he makes little mention of his strong support for free-trade deals that are widely blamed for devastating manufacturing employment. Instead, he uses language that went out of fashion in the British Labour Party more than a decade ago as he talks about government intervention and spending money on research and development to “rebuild this industry”.

Mr Romney is not alone among Republican presidential candidates in seeking to address a growing sense of anxiety, from blue-collar workers to the middle class, at the prospect of high oil prices, globalisation and an already discernible economic slowdown.

Mike Huckabee, who defeated Mr Romney in Iowa with support drawn largely from evangelical Christian voters, has focused less on social issues such as abortion in Michigan and more on his sharply populist economic message.

He cautioned that Republicans risk losing the “Reagan Democrats” of lower-income workers who helped to build a coalition that has dominated American politics for most of the past 28 years. The economy must “work for Main Street, not just Wall Street”, the former Arkansas Governor says.

John McCain vanquished Mr Romney in New Hampshire last week with the help of independent voters attracted in part by his support for measures to tackle climate change — which are seen in Michigan as damaging to the motor industry.

This gnarled truth-teller of Republican politics — who says that he is “as old as dirt, with more scars than Frankenstein” — refuses to join Mr Romney in promising to save every job. Time moves on, Mr McCain suggests, just as it did for those working in “buggy-whip factories and haberdashers when cars replaced carriages and men stopped wearing hats”.

However, at a campaign rally at Michigan State University, Mr McCain insisted that the future was still “bright and beautiful” as he held out a vision of a new high-tech industry making more fuel-efficient cars.

At an event in Kalamazoo yesterday he pledged a vast retraining programme that would offer a “new day for workers in Michigan, where the best, most-productive workers in the world reside”.

Polls suggest that Mr Romney has a narrow lead in the Michigan Republican race over Mr McCain and Mr Huckabee, a well-placed third. The election could be determined by independents and Democrat voters who switch over because they have only Hillary Clinton among the leading candidates on their ballot papers.

The absence of the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards is a consequence of a rules dispute with the national party over Michigan’s decision to move its primary forward from February.

Saul Anuzis, chairman of Michigan Republicans, believes that the early election has been vindicated by focus on the state’s economic problems — and even the emergence of an industrial and employment policy platform missing from Republican campaigns for much of the past decade. “People are looking for solutions,” he said.

Times Recommends

• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• Wish you were here, says Iraq tourist board
• Russian policeman’s corruption plea to Putin