Will 2008 headline ruin Romney's chances?

Four words have come back to haunt Mitt Romney in his presidential campaign: "Let Detroit go bankrupt."

That's the headline of a 2008 opinion piece Romney wrote in The New York Times. Romney gives the piece an equally incendiary opening: "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye," he wrote. "It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed."

Well, that just didn't happen. The auto industry has roared back after the bailouts and is on track to sell 14.3 million cars and trucks this year, up from 13.3 million last year.

Romney made some valid points in his piece, such as his push for fuel-saving designs and new innovation from other industries. But no one remembers that. Instead, voters in the potential election-swinging state of Ohio remember that President Obama helped orchestrate the auto rescue while Romney favored the restructuring that a bankruptcy would bring.

To be sure, there are other factors weighing on voters' minds in Ohio. But experts say that the auto rescue specifically may have shifted Ohio from a Republican-leaning state to a Democratic-leaning one.

"The auto rescue is popular in Ohio," Paul Beck, a professor emeritus at Ohio State University, told The Times.

Some of the top manufacturing employers in Ohio include Honda (HMC), General Motors (GM) and Ford (F), according to state data. Ohio generated 8.1% of the nation's motor-vehicle production in 2010.

The Center for Automotive research says that some 200,000 jobs in Ohio are tied either directly or indirectly to the auto industry.

Macleans notes that if Romney's 2008 call for bankruptcy ends up hurting him in Ohio, it might mean that some unions are still popular in the United States, even if overall union support is dying. Some lawmakers have been able to successfully go after teachers' unions and other public-sector unions.

"Even though union power probably isn’t coming back, particularly in America, there's still a certain affection for the old-style unions that made it possible for people to work a steady job and retire comfortably -- the kind of thing that is more or less being relegated to the past, partly by choice, partly by changes," writes Jaime Weinman. "If Romney loses, it might be because he didn't get the difference between taking on public-sector unions and taking on the unions that people still kind of like."

More from MSN Money

• Dow jumps as Americans head to polls
• Election Day clues point to next president
• The election outcome Wall Street wants most