CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Don’t expect President Barack Obama to try to reinvent himself next week at the Democratic Party’s national convention. Instead, he and a slew of his defenders will seek to convince voters to stick with the president they know rather than gamble on someone new, a challenging task given that most Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction.

“This Thursday, I will offer you what I believe is a better path forward, a path that grows this economy, creates more jobs and strengthens the middle class,” Obama said Saturday in Des Moines, Iowa, previewing his pitch. “And the good news is, you get to choose which path we take.”

While Democratic loyalists will fill the stadium where Obama accepts the nomination Thursday night, the president’s target audience is the small sliver of undecided voters in battleground states who will be critical to the outcome of what polls show is a tight race with two months to go. His campaign also will try to revive some of its insurgent, grassroots appeal from 2008 by using technology to let people participate in the convention. That effort also will help Obama’s team collect more data on voters.