Obama, McCain make final efforts to rally their troops
In Tampa, McCain declares 'the Mac is back' and says he'll win presidency. Obama, in Jacksonville, tells supporters, 'We're going to have to work like our future depends on it in the next 24 hours.'
Reporting from Moon Township, Pa., Jefferson City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla. -- Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain blitzed the political and geographic map of the United States today as the presidential election moved into its last hours with the candidates making their last appeals to undecided voters and swing states.
The major party candidates sought to cram in one more rally, one more denunciation of a foe and one more exhortation for supporters to go to the polls on Tuesday. Experts estimate that around 130 million people will vote this year; tens of millions have already waited in long lines to cast their ballots.
"This is going to be close all across the country," Obama told a rally that attracted 10,000 people in Jacksonville, Fla. "We're going to have to work like our future depends on it in the next 24 hours, because it does."
"My friends, it's official," McCain told a raucous post-midnight rally in Miami, with salsa dancers, a live band and crowd of mostly Latino voters. "There's just one day left until we take America in a new direction."
Campaigning hours later in Tampa, McCain used an often-repeated refrain in the waning days of the election as he spoke to 1,300 people beneath an enormous billboard bearing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' pirate flag logo.
"The pundits may not know it and the Democrats may not know it, but the Mac is back. We're going to win this election," he insisted.
National polls show Obama leading, though some surveys in battleground states are within the margin of error. In order to win the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president, McCain, 72, has to carry every state that George Bush won in 2004, though Obama is leading in some of those states. Republicans are seriously contending in only one traditional Democratic state, Pennsylvania.
In today's grinding trek through the pivotal states of Florida, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico and Nevada, McCain is expected to sound his basic campaign themes: that Obama is too liberal and too inexperienced in foreign affairs to be president. McCain will finish tonight in his home state of Arizona, where Democrats launched a last-minute advertising campaign in the hope of stealing a state from the GOP.
Obama has repeatedly linked McCain to the unpopular Bush administration, a tactic he continued today. After Florida, Obama campaigned in Charlotte, N.C., and Manassas, Va., before his return tonight to his hometown of Chicago. Both North Carolina and Virginia are Republican states that Democrats believe are within their grasp.
