US president Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney make a frenetic dash to a series of crucial swing states today, 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 the candidates are essentially deadlocked ahead of tomorrow's election, although Mr Obama has a slight advantage in the eight or nine battleground states that will decide the winner.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos national poll of likely voters, a daily tracking poll, gave Mr Obama a slight edge, with 48 per cent support compared to Mr Romney's 46 per cent. The difference was within the 3.4 percentage point credibility interval, which allows for statistical variation in Internet-based polls.
Mr Obama plans to visit three of those swing states today and Mr 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 tomorrow, with Mr Obama's Democrats now expected to narrowly hold their Senate majority and Mr Romney's Republicans favoured 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 US 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 Mr Obama and Mr Romney focused on firing up core supporters and wooing the last few undecided voters in battleground states.
Mr Romney reached out to dissatisfied Mr Obama supporters from 2008, calling himself the candidate of change and ridiculing Mr Obama's failure to live up to his campaign promises. "He promised to do so very much but frankly he fell so very short," Mr Romney said at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, yesterday.
Mr 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," Mr Obama said in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Bruce Springsteen welcomed the president on stage during a rally in Madison, Wisconsin.
"Wisconsin, tomorrow you have a choice to make," he said. "It is a choice between two different visions for America."
On the defensive throughout the year for presiding over persistently high unemployment, Mr Obama said the choice was between the Republicans' "top-down policies that crashed our economy" and his own approach to moving the country forward.
Mr Romney was in Lynchburg, Virginia, telling voters: "One final push is going to get us there. We're only one day away from a fresh start, one day away from the start of a new beginning," he said.
Mr Obama will also do a final blitz across Ohio and Iowa which, together with Wisconsin, would be enough to get him more than the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.
Mr Romney visited 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 Mr Romney.
The former Massachusetts governor has few paths to victory if he cannot win in Ohio, where Mr Obama has kept a small but steady lead in polls for months.
Mr 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 per cent national rate.
That has undercut Mr Romney's frequent criticism of Mr Obama's economic leadership, which has focused on the persistently high jobless rate and what Mr Romney calls Mr Obama's big spending efforts to expand government power.
Mr 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.
Mr Obama's campaign fired back with ads criticising Mr Romney's experience and portraying the multimillionaire as out of touch with everyday Americans.
Mr Obama and allies said Mr Romney's firm, Bain Capital, plundered companies and eliminated jobs to maximize profits. They also made an issue of Mr Romney's refusal to release more than two years of personal tax returns.
Reuters