Last 48 hours: Tied at the top, Obama and Romney race for poll glory

Both scheduled to cross paths in Ohio; 27 million have already cast ballots.

DES MOINES/ CONCORDE: With 48 hours to go before their electoral showdown, President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney were still criss-crossing America on Sunday and making their closing arguments in key battleground states.

While Obama flew to New Hampshire to reprise a buddy act from the night before with Bill Clinton, Romney was preparing to make a last-minute play for Pennsylvania. “Two days! Two days and we go to work!” Romney shouted as he began the day with an event in Des Moines, Iowa.

On a gruelling swing that will end in Wisconsin in the early hours of Tuesday, Obama will also travel to Florida, Colorado and Ohio on Sunday. Both men are scheduled to cross paths in Ohio, a state which will yield a critical 18 electoral votes, on Sunday because Romney will also be in Ohio (and Virginia).

Obama and Romney are separated in national polls by a fraction of a percentage, indicating that the two candidates are closely matched. They are effectively tied in national polls of the popular vote but Obama appears to be in a stronger position in the battleground states, and if the polls are accurate, seems to be in position to win re-election.  A Wall Street Journal poll has given Obama a one percent lead in a national poll, 48 to 47 per cent, but that figure had not yet been factored into the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls, which still gave Obama only a 0.2 per cent lead. According to a Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll released on Sunday, of 3,805 likely voters polled nationally, 48 per cent said they would vote for Obama, while 47 per cent sided with Romney. The results fall within the poll’s “credibility interval,” a tool used to account for statistical variation in Internet-based polls.

Campaign aides pointed at early voting advantages in states like Ohio and Florida as evidence that Obama is close to sealing the deal in his quest to become only the second Democrat since World War II to get a second term.

By Sunday an estimated 27 million people had already cast ballots in early voting. In Florida, a judge extended the early voting hours in Orange County after Democrats filed a lawsuit that cited a bomb threat that shut down an early voting location there for several hours on Saturday. Another suit was filed by Demcrats to extend early voting across Florida. The balloting officially ended on Saturday. Republican lawmakers had shortened early voting to eight days this year, from 14 days four years ago. Democrats have complained that the action was taken to make it harder for supporters of Obama to cast their ballots.

In Miami-Dade County, election officials said they would keep their office open on Sunday to accept absentee ballots even though in-person early voting has ended. “Early vote’s gone very well for us. We think we’re closing with strong momentum,” Obama advisor David Plouffe told ABC.

As the neck-and-neck race boils down to a handful of votes in a handful of states both sides are trumpeting their organizational skills and get-out-the-vote drive as decisive.

“Number one, their ground game is not superior,” Romney aide Ed Gillespie told CNN. “And, number two, I think those undecided voters are going to turn out, and they’re going to break pretty strongly against the president.”

Deidre McNab, president of Florida’s League of Women Voters, said the longest reported lines were at polling sites in urban areas and locations most convenient to college students, senior citizens and minority voters.

However, she said there appeared to be a backlash under way with many voters enduring difficult conditions to cast ballots. “Florida voters are very aware of two things: No 1, the importance of their vote in this national election and, No 2, they are very aware of voter suppression laws. And we are so heartened to see they are voting in what so far appears to be record numbers,” McNab said.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2012.