Monday, 2008-03-308
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama drew massive crowds to some of his final campaign rallies as Americans appeared likely to cap the longest, most expensive White House campaign ever by electing the Democrat as the first black U.S. president on Tuesday.
Republican John McCain, looking to score the United States' biggest political upset in 60 years, assured supporters that the race is tightening.
"My friends, it's official: There's just one day left until we take America in a new direction," McCain said at a raucous, heavily Hispanic rally in Miami in the early hours of Monday.
But polls show Obama leading in Pennsylvania and other key states. Nationally, several major polls indicate Obama has a 7-8 percentage-point advantage.
A USA Today/Gallup poll being published Monday found likely voters favoring Obama by 11 points over McCain, 53-42 percent. The poll was conducted Friday through Sunday among 3,050 adults, and had a margin of error of 2 percent.
With the economy in turmoil and the approval levels of President George W. Bush, a Republican, at near-record lows, Democrats have high hopes not only of capturing the White House, but also expanding their majorities in both chambers of Congress.
A victory would mark a stunning rise for the 47-year-old Obama, who was little known nationally before being elected as a senator from Illinois four years ago. He began running for president just two years later.
Obama exuded confidence Sunday. "The last couple of days, I've been just feeling good," he told 80,000 gathered to hear him -- and singer Bruce Springsteen -- in Cleveland, in the pivotal state of Ohio. "The crowds seem to grow and everybody's got a smile on their face. You start thinking that maybe we might be able to win an election on November 4th."
An earlier rally in Columbus, Ohio, drew an estimated 60,000 people.
Obama has capitalized on anti-Republican sentiment, linking McCain to the unpopular Bush. McCain's campaign has tried to cast Obama as too inexperienced, too liberal and too tainted by associations with unsavory characters.
The electoral map clearly favors Obama. To be elected, a candidate must win at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes distributed to states roughly in proportion to their population. In most cases, the candidate who wins a plurality of votes in a state wins all of that state's electoral votes.
Obama is favored to win all the states Democrats captured in 2004, when Bush defeated Sen. John Kerry. That would give him 251 votes. He is leading or tied in several states won by Bush, giving him several possibilities for reaching the 270 votes -- winning a big Bush state like Ohio or Florida, or a combination of smaller ones.
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