With only a day to go before campaigning ends by Monday night, the US presidential race has narrowed down to states that have been reliably Republican in recent elections, or in the case of Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, that have not voted for a Democratic hopeful in decades. Heading into the last day, Democrat candidate Barak Obama has a clear lead with 238 solid electoral votes out of a total of 538 - he needs only 270 to be elected and has an additional 73 votes in Democrat leaning states, according to pollsters. Republican candidate John McCain, however, has only 127 solid electoral votes plus 5 Republican leaning votes, making the math heavily loaded against him, even if he bags all the 95 votes in tossup states. An Associated Press-Yahoo News national survey of likely voters put Obama ahead, 51 to 43, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Gallup Poll tracking survey calculated Obama's margin at 10 percentage points, 52-42. Little wonder, then, that McCain, and his vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be on a dizzying schedule Tuesday, making a last-ditch effort. They will be campaigning in strongly Democrat New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) and Iowa (7); Democrat leaning Pennsylvannia (21), Ohio (20), and Nevada (5); the tossup state of Missouri (11); and strongly Republican Indiana (11) and Tennessee (11). Obama and his running mate Joe Biden, on the other hand, will wind up with Ohio, Nevada Pennsylvannia and Virginia (which is Democrat leaning with 13 electoral votes), and make a final push in the tossup states of North Carolina (15) and Florida (27). Both candidates were backed by armies of supporters manning phone banks, handing out brochures and spinning journalists as the campaigns made their final push in a race that carried a price tag estimated at $2 billion. McCain's hopes for election day Nov. 4 hinges on winning all or nearly all the states that carried Bush to victory in 2004, and possibly carrying Pennsylvania to give him a margin for error in America's state-by-state system of choosing a president. For Obama, polls suggest it was a matter of closing in for the kill. “We have a righteous wind at our back,” he said Saturday of his bid to become the first black American president. But McCain's campaign says the Arizona senator is closing the gap in the final days. Privately, McCain's aides said he trailed Obama by just 4 points nationwide in internal polling. According to the AP-Yahoo poll, one in seven voters –14 percent of the total – said they were undecided or might yet change their minds. But a thumb rule among pollsters is that undecided voters generally split evenly between the leading candidates.
