President Obama’s path to reelection is already precarious, but it will become infinitely more difficult if he’s unable to improve his standing in Pennsylvania.
 

The president travels to the Keystone State this week to talk about the need to create jobs in hopes of winning over the working-class white voters who remain his greatest challenge. Pennsylvania has voted reliably, if narrowly, for Democratic presidential contenders since 1988, but it’s looking more like a toss-up for Obama in 2012.
 

Obama’s Pennsylvania success last time was buoyed by a record showing of minority and young voters who helped him survive despite losing the white working class by 15 points.
 

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by hundreds of thousands in the perennial swing state, but many of those voters either remain suspicious of the president or have abandoned him altogether. The president, who carried Pennsylvania by 10 percentage points in 2008, is now tied with or trailing front-runner Mitt Romney in pollsters’ hypothetical match-ups.
 

And with the economy still lagging and unemployment stubbornly high, Obama’s problems are likely to grow, his supporters admit.
 

“Heck yeah, Obama has problems here,” said one high-ranking Pennsylvania union leader. “I’m genuinely worried that he’s just lost too many white voters and that all the people who were starry-eyed last time for him will just stay home.”
 

Such a development would be disastrous for Obama.
 

The president faces even longer odds of carrying the traditionally red states he won in 2008, including Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. So Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, becomes all the more crucial in an election most analysts expect to be closely contested.
 

Obama’s ace-in-the-hole is Vice President Joe Biden, who was raised in a Catholic family in Scranton. Biden will be dispatched routinely during election season in hopes of shoring up the president’s deficiencies with blue-collar voters, according to campaign officials.
 

And Team Obama is also banking on a deeply entrenched union presence and a surplus of Democratic local office holders to provide the organizational muscle needed to mobilize the party’s rank and file. In 2008, Obama relied on a coalition of younger liberals and political operatives from other states to organize his successful Pennsylvania effort.
 

Obama earlier this month won the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union, which has 80,000 members in Pennsylvania, a massive army of potential volunteers for a campaign that has been recruiting and organizing its grassroots support while Republicans are fighting for their party’s nomination.
 

“Voters in Pennsylvania will have a clear choice in this election, to continue with the progress the president has made fighting for economic security for the middle class and proposals that would create jobs now or the GOP candidates like Mitt Romney that are focused on giving tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations,” said Obama campaign spokesman Ben Finkenbinder.
 

However, organizational prowess could make little difference to conservative Pennsylvania Democrats who still largely base their vote on cultural issues – an area where they remain particularly skeptical of the president.
 

In 2008, Obama outraged Pennsylvania voters when he claimed – during a ritzy fundraiser in San Francisco -- ­ that the Keystone State’s small-town residents “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
 

Obama lost Pennsylvania’s primary to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who trounced him among the older white voters, the same voters he’s trying to win over now.

bhughes@washingtonexaminer.com