Mitt Romney is fighting to earn a new look from voters with 30 days remaining until the election, as President Barack Obama looks to close the window on his Republican challenger. 

Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has hopes of building momentum off of his strong debate performance this week, in which he generally outperformed Obama with energetic and crisp arguments.

But a top spokesman for the president vowed Sunday that Obama wouldn't allow Romney a repeat performance in their second showdown.

"It's not rocket science to believe the president was disappointed in the expectations he has for himself," former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on "Meet the Press" of Obama's debate performance, which was panned as lethargic and lacking in aggression.

Of the second debate, scheduled for Oct. 16, Gibbs said, "I think you're going to see a very engaged president that is ready and willing to call out whichever Mitt Romney shows up."

Romney "walked over" Obama in Denver, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of Romney's erstwhile primary opponents, contended. But Gingrich also acknowledged that the GOP nominee had "changed" from the primary, when he vowed to cut taxes for individuals in all income brackets. (Romney said in Wednesday's debate that, in his reform plan, the wealthy wouldn't end up paying any less in taxes.)

Whether Romney has made up much ground versus Obama hasn't yet been fully reflected in polls conducted since the debate. The Republican hopeful entered the matchup trailing the president, and must make up ground — especially in battleground states like Ohio — if Romney is to have any hope of winning on Nov. 6.

"The real question to me, of this campaign, is, can the Romney campaign take this moment and run with it?" asked Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican consultant with ties to Romney.

Romney won the endorsement of a newspaper in one such swing state, Nevada, as the editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal said Romney "has the principles and experience needed to put America back on the road to prosperity."

But Obama's case for re-election was bolstered Friday by a new jobs report that showed the unemployment rate at 7.8 percent in September, clearing the psychological barrier of 8 percent, above which the unemployment rate had sat for months. 

"I think it was a significant help to the president," Gingrich said of that report.

Obama's advantage over Romney was fueled partly by improving perceptions of the economy, which could be cemented by the new employment data. If nothing else, the president will have a new cudgel to wield against Romney in their next debate matchup. 

Both Romney and Obama will leave it to their running mates this week to carry the banner on Thursday, at the vice presidential debate. 

"I know Vice President Biden is anxious and ready to do this," Gibbs said of Biden's impending debate versus Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee.

In the meanwhile, both the president and Romney aren't taking the weekend off; instead, they're both on the campaign trail this Sunday. Romney will hold a rally this afternoon in Florida, while Obama attends a "30 days to victory" fundraising concert tonight in Los Angeles.

Still assessing the lessons of its crushing defeat in last week’s Wisconsin recall election, the AFL-CIO labor confederation partnered with minority and youth organizations Tuesday to launch a new effort in six battleground states to register and mobilize voters and to battle any legal impediments to voting.

The six target states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Nevada.

With support from organized labor and minority voters, President Obama carried all six of those states in 2008.

Two of them – Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – have enacted strict voter identification requirements but Wisconsin's law is being litigated and may not be in effect in November.

The Wisconsin voter ID requirement was suspended for last week’s recall election.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker refused to tell reporters how much the labor confederation will spend on the voter effort but said, “We are putting every resource we have available and that means our human resource, which is the most valuable resource we have, behind this effort … We will have millions of people out there on the ground active participating in this process to ensure that voters are educated about what their rights are … and have what they need to have relative to voter ID.”

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She said union lawyers will help train polling place monitors who will serve as poll workers in some precincts. “We will be joining with others in (law)suits if necessary to make sure we can protect the right of people to vote…. This is a seamless kind of effort,” Holt Baker said.

The other groups joining the AFL-CIO are the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza and a coalition of progressive youth groups called Generational Alliance.

Andy Manis / Getty Images

Voters cast their ballots in a recall election for the governor and lieutenant governor at the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center June 5, 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin.

When asked whether AFL-CIO strategists had done precinct-by-precinct analysis to see why labor failed in its effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker last week – with Walker winning nearly 68,000 more voters than he did when he ran in 2010 – Holt Baker replied, “Some of the analysis is still being done,” but she said there was anecdotal evidence that some voters in Milwaukee were unable to vote due to lack of poll workers in some places.

“Don’t be fooled by Wisconsin,” she said, instead labor will learn from Ohio where it succeeded in a referendum in blocking a law restricting labor union rights.

“We hit our targets” last week in Wisconsin, said Mike Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO political director, but Walker’s allies outperformed organized labor in turning out Walker voters – “more than people expected ahead of time.”

One lesson Podhorzer cited in the Walker victory: “They spent a lot of money on mail in addition to TV. There have been reports in the media about (Walker allies) putting up large phone banks; they invested in belts and suspenders. They decided this was a race they couldn’t afford to lose.”

Podhorzer added that “we still don’t know who actually voted” since the voter file data won’t be available until July.