President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney will both make campaign speeches focused on the economy in Ohio Thursday. The presidential nominees will offer deeply contrasting plans of how to fix the struggling economy, the Associated Press reported. 

Obama is expected to pull attention away from recent bad economic news including a jobless rate that rose to 8.2 percent in May and a shrunken median family net worth, the AP reported. The president will focus on the difference between his economic ideas and Romney’s. The former Massachusetts governor will focus on how he would lead the economy and what would be his priorities in his first 100 days in office. 

Obama will speak at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland while Romney will be approximately 250 miles away at a manufacturing company in Cincinnati. 

According to the AP, Obama isn’t expected to announce any big policy changes while in the highly contested state. 

From the AP: 

Obama will probably pound on the second-term economic vision he began laying out months ago. He will lay out a jobs plan of spending tax money on education, energy, science and innovation and transportation; cutting the debt by reducing spending elsewhere and raising taxes on the wealthy; and taking on the nation's loophole-loaded tax code to make it fairer.

Romney will talk about cutting regulation and spending, overhauling the tax system, doing away with Obama's health care overhaul and supporting a major oil pipeline known as Keystone XL. Setting his own expectations for Obama, Romney told donors in Cincinnati: "He'll speak with great rhetoric and eloquence. But actions and records speak a heck of a lot louder than words."

Obama is expected to ask voters for more time to boost growth and argue that Romney would revive President George W. Bush’s policies, Reuters reported, while Romney’s expected to attack Obama’s economic record. 

 

Reach Executive Producer Agnus Dei Farrant here.