It's typical for Presidential candidates on the last day of an election campaign to make as many campaign stops as possible, shouting themselves hoarse and trying to shore up as many states as possible. This very close contest will be no exception.
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After a long and expensive campaign, in which candidates and their PACs attacked the other side in nasty campaign ads (non-stop in some states), national polls show Obama and Romney are essentially deadlocked.
RealClearPolitics (RCP)'s aggregate polling number has Obama at 47.8% and Romney at 47.4%, although Obama has a slight advantage in the eight or nine battleground states that will decide the winner.
President Barack Obama plans to visit three of those swing states today and Governor Mitt Romney will travel to four. Obama will close his campaign on Monday with a final blitz across Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa - three Midwestern states that his campaign strategists feel are the key to victory. His final stop tonight will be in Iowa.
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 - especially for Romney.
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The election's outcome will be important for 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 and the challenge of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The balance of power in Congress also will be at stake on Tuesday. Polling predicts that the Democrats will narrowly hold their Senate majority and the Republicans will 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 that the election will be a cliffhanger that could be decided by which side has the best turnout operation and gets its voters to the polls. The outcome that many are dreading is the possibility of state contests being decided by absentee ballots, recounts, and court challenges.
Romney tried to appeal to dissatisfied Obama supporters from 2008, calling himself the candidate of change. He was critical of 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 yesterday.
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. Obama has been helped 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 reduced the effectiveness of 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.
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Romney's religion has not been much of an issue. Romney would be the first Mormon president if elected. He has centered his campaign message 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. Many of Obama's campaign ads have alleged that 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.
This has been a remarkable and unique election campaign year. The Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court (which struck down laws prohibiting campaign advertising other than by the respective campaigns) has made it especially unique for the flood of advertising. I'm not sure whether or not I'll be happy or bored when it's over.