Campaign to go on until minutes before polls close

THE TWO-YEAR campaign for the White House by Barack Obama and John McCain will continue until minutes before the final polls …

THE TWO-YEAR campaign for the White House by Barack Obama and John McCain will continue until minutes before the final polls close tomorrow night.

Usually, presidential candidates pass up on campaigning as Americans go to vote, but the two men have abandoned the practice as they continue their high-octane bids to attract support.

The Obama campaign claims that they will have one million volunteers out on election day, along with hundreds of thousands of supporters from other organisations, although there is no way of confirming these figures.

In Ohio last weekend, his team knocked on 310,000 doors, while the Republicans say that they contacted five million Americans by telephone to encourage them to vote for their candidate.

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Mr McCain, who campaigned in seven states throughout yesterday, normally goes to the movies on the day of voting itself, but he intends to make one last pitch in Colorado and New Mexico, key states this year.

Mr Obama, on the other hand, visited two traditionally Republican states, North Carolina and Virginia, which could fall the Democrat's way if pre-election polling figures turn out to be accurate.

About 27 million absentee and early votes had already been cast by Saturday night - the highest total ever - and registered Democrat voters substantially outnumbered Republicans in all of them, according to early analysis.

In North Carolina, for example, 2.5 million people have already voted - 41 per cent of all those registered - which has more than doubled the previous record of 1.1 million, set in the 2004 election between George Bush and John Kerry.

Although the Republicans have been out-spent heavily by the Obama presidential campaign throughout, they have begun to match advert for advert in key battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

President George Bush, with the lowest approval ratings of any president and who has been invisible during the campaign, will continue to stay out of the limelight in its final hours.