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After A Long Campaign Season, A Blitz Through The Battleground

President Obama greets supporters during a campaign rally at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia, on Nov.
Jewel Samad
/
AFP/Getty Images
President Obama greets supporters during a campaign rally at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia, on Nov.

It's almost over. We're just hours from Election Day 2012, which means President Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney are blitzing the battleground states in the final day of campaigning.

Here's ABC News with the schedule:

"President Obama is set to hit urban centers in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa, with Bruce Springsteen tagging along as his opening act. Jay-Z is scheduled to join the campaign at a mid-afternoon gathering in the Buckeye State.

"Like the president, Mitt Romney will make one last play for Ohio, arriving in Columbus four hours after Obama leaves for Iowa. It will be the Republican's third stop in a day that sees him track north from Florida — where the wait to register an early vote this weekend lasted as long as six hours — to Virginia, ending the night with one last rally in New Hampshire."

If you include the surrugates — the first lady and the vice president, for example — the schedule is ever more frenetic.

As Reuters reports, the campaigns are also delivering their closing statements. Of course they are trying to get their base to the polls, but they're also concentrating on wooing the last remaining undecided voters.

Romney, explains Reuters, is doing so by citing a disappointment with Obama.

"He promised to do so very much but frankly he fell so very short," Romney has said.

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney arrives for a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday.
EMMANUEL DUNAND / AFP/Getty Images
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AFP/Getty Images
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney arrives for a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday.

Obama is making his case by defending his record and framing the election as a "choice between two different versions of America."

"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," Reuters reports.

As for the final polls? We're not far off from where we were a year ago. The national polls are pointing to nail-biter, whereas the state-by-state polls are predicting a slim Obama victory.

The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Obama up by 0.5 percent nationally. The New York Times statistics wizard Nate Silver, whose prediction model relies on state-by-state polls now has Obama as the clear favorite with almost 9 in 10 odds of winning.

Over the weekend, Silver mused that for Romney to win, "state polls must be statistically biased," which he says is amounts to a about a 10 percent chance.

That's exactly the case that some conservatives are making. GOP strategist Karl Rove, for example, says it's a tight race and that statisticians are giving democrats a bit too much credit with undecided voters.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.