Final campaign day dawns for Obama, Romney

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.

What is a swing-state?

In US presidential politics, a swing state, also referred to as a battleground state, is a state in which no single candidate or party has an outright majority or support in securing that state’s Electoral College votes.

These states are typically targets of both major political parties in presidential elections, since winning these states is the best opportunity for a party to gain electoral votes. This year’s key battleground states include:

Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio labelled yellow in the map below.

Obama, Romney to close campaign with swing-state blitzes

The only state scheduled to get a last-day visit from both candidates is Ohio

In the final days, both Barack Obama and Mitt 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.

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.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2012.