WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney make a frenetic dash to a series of crucial swing states on Monday, delivering their final arguments to voters on the last day of an extraordinarily close race for the White House.
After a long, bitter and expensive campaign, national polls show Obama and Romney
are essentially deadlocked ahead of Tuesday's election, although Obama
has a slight advantage in the eight or nine battleground states that
will decide the winner.
Obama plans to
visit three of those swing states on Monday and Romney will travel to
four to plead for support in a fierce White House campaign that focused primarily on the lagging economy but at times turned intensely personal.
The election's
outcome will impact a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues,
from the looming "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax increases that
could kick in at the end of the year to questions about how to handle
illegal immigration or the thorny challenge of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The balance of power in Congress also will be at stake
on Tuesday, with Obama's Democrats now expected to narrowly hold their
Senate majority and Romney's Republicans favored to retain control of
the House of Representatives.In a race where the two candidates and their party allies raised a combined $2 billion, the most in U.S. history, both sides have pounded the heavily contested battleground states with an unprecedented barrage of ads.
The close margins in state and national polls suggested the possibility of a cliffhanger that could be decided by which side has the best turnout operation and gets its voters to the polls.
In the final days, both Obama and Romney focused on firing up core supporters and wooing the last few undecided voters in battleground states.
Romney reached out to dissatisfied Obama supporters from 2008, calling himself the candidate of change and ridiculing Obama's failure to live up to his campaign promises. "He promised to do so very much but frankly he fell so very short," Romney said at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday.
Obama, citing improving economic reports on the pace of hiring, argued in the final stretch that he has made progress in turning around the economy but needed a second White House term to finish the job. "This is a choice between two different versions of America," Obama said in Cincinnati, Ohio.
FINAL SWING-STATE BLITZES
Obama will close
his campaign on Monday with a final blitz across Wisconsin, Ohio and
Iowa - three Midwestern states that, barring surprises elsewhere, would
be enough to get him more than the 270 electoral votes needed for
victory.
Polls show Obama
has slim leads in all three. His final stop on Monday night will be in
Iowa, the state that propelled him on the path to the White House in
2008 with a victory in its first-in-the nation caucus.
Romney will visit his must-win states of Florida and
Virginia - where polls show he is slightly ahead or tied - along with
Ohio before concluding in New Hampshire, where he launched his
presidential run last year.The only state scheduled to get a last-day visit from both candidates is Ohio, the most critical of the remaining battlegrounds - particularly for Romney.
The former
Massachusetts governor has few paths to victory if he cannot win in
Ohio, where Obama has kept a small but steady lead in polls for months.
Obama has been
buoyed in Ohio by his support for a federal bailout of the auto
industry, where one in every eight jobs is tied to car manufacturing,
and by a strong state economy with an unemployment rate lower than the
7.9 percent national rate.
That has undercut
Romney's frequent criticism of Obama's economic leadership, which has
focused on the persistently high jobless rate and what Romney calls
Obama's big spending efforts to expand government power.
Romney, who would
be the first Mormon president, has centered his campaign pitch on his
own experience as a business leader at a private equity fund and said it
made him uniquely suited to create jobs.
Obama's campaign fired back with ads criticizing
Romney's experience and portraying the multimillionaire as out of touch
with everyday Americans.
Obama and allies
said Romney's firm, Bain Capital, plundered companies and eliminated
jobs to maximize profits. They also made an issue of Romney's refusal to
release more than two years of personal tax returns.
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