Their messages spare and urgent, Barack Obama and John McCain implored uncertain voters to move their way and beseeched the convinced to cast ballots as they barreled Sunday through a swath of battleground states.
Two days before the election is no time to uncork new arguments, so each man stuck to the basics. McCain, struggling to come from behind, hit Obama on taxes and national security and raised the specter of disaster if Democrats control Congress and the White House.
"There's just two days left. We're a couple of points behind in Pennsylvania. The pundits have written us off just like they've done before," McCain told about 2,000 supporters in a high school gymnasium in the Philadelphia suburb of Wallingford. But, he suggested, reports of his demise were premature.
"My friends, the Mac is back."
Obama, trying to expand his lead, restated his early opposition to the Iraq war, insisted that he was better positioned to help the middle class and said that McCain would pursue the same policies that have led to economic disarray.
"Go vote right now," Obama told more than 60,000 people outside the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. "Do not be late."
Both campaigns and their allies also pressed negative messages, some of them out of public view. The Republican Party unleashed automated phone calls using the words of Democratic primary opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton against Obama, and a GOP group aired television ads featuring Obama's former pastor, the controversial Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Obama's campaign aired ads tying McCain to the unpopular duo of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and sent mailers highlighting the Republican's plan to tax healthcare benefits.
In both cases, the appeals seemed targeted to older white women, who polls have shown make up a high proportion of the voters still undecided after more than a year of nonstop campaigning.
Surveys released Sunday showed the difficulty the Arizona senator faces as he tries to reverse the trajectory of the race. He continued to trail nationally in the mid- to high-single digits. Some surveys showed the race tightening in key states, but McCain would have to win all of them to turn the tide from Obama.
Across the battleground states, voters were under siege. Phones rang off the hook with appeals. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers and activists rang doorbells and dropped off voting information. In one poll released Sunday by Diageo/Hotline, 2 in 5 voters said they had been talked to by at least one campaign.
