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| President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney |
US President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have closed out their hard-fought battle for the White House, yielding center stage to voters who face a stark choice on election day between fundamentally different visions for the country’s future.
After months of campaigning and billions of dollars spent in the battle for leadership of the world’s most powerful country, Mr Obama and Mr Romney were in a virtual nationwide tie ahead of the election, a sign of the vast partisan divide separating Americans in the early years of the 21st century.
Mr Obama appeared to have a slight edge, however, in some of the key swing states such as Ohio that do not vote reliably Democrat or Republican. That gives him an easier path to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Mr Romney decided to make a late dash to Cleveland and Pittsburgh for rallies on Tuesday before returning to his Boston home to await the returns.
Mr Obama, who spent Monday night at his home in Chicago, opted to make a dozen radio and satellite TV interviews from the city to swing states to keep his closing arguments fresh in voters’ minds.
Mr Romney has made a late-campaign drive for Pennsylvania, a state that had been seen as solidly in the Obama column. The move was widely seen as a push - perhaps against all odds – to compensate for Mr Obama’s expected victory in Ohio.
Under the US system, the winner of the presidential election is not determined by the nationwide popular vote but in state-by-state contests. The candidate who wins a state – with Maine and Nebraska the exceptions – is awarded all of that state’s electoral votes, which are apportioned based on representation in Congress.
Both sides cast the election day choice as one with far-reaching repercussions for a nation still recovering from the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression and at odds over how big a role government should play in solving the country’s problems.
“It’s a choice between two different visions for America,” Mr Obama declared on Monday in Madison, Wisconsin, asking voters to let him complete work on the economic turnaround that began in his first term. “It’s a choice between returning to the top-down policies that crashed our economy, or a future that’s built on providing opportunity to everybody and growing a strong middle class.”
Mr Romney argued that Mr Obama had his chance and blew it.
“The president thinks more government is the answer,” he said in Sanford, Florida. “No, Mr president, more jobs, that’s the answer for America.”
It is not just the presidency at stake: all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the 100 Senate seats, and 11 governorships are on the line, along with state ballot proposals on topics ranging from gay marriage to legalising marijuana.
Democrats were expected to maintain their majority in the Senate, with Republicans doing likewise in the House, raising the prospect of continued partisan wrangling no matter who might be president.
The two candidates and their running mates – Joe Biden and Paul Ryan – stormed through eight battleground states and logged more than 6,000 flight miles on Monday on their final full day of campaigning.
Mr Obama’s final campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, was filled with nostalgia as he returned to the state which launched him on the road to the White House in 2008 with a victory in its lead-off caucuses over Hillary Clinton, now his secretary of state.
The president urged voters in Iowa to help him finish what they started four years ago.
“I’ve come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your vote,” Mr Obama told 20,000 supporters at the outdoor rally. “This is where our movement for change began.”
After rallies in Florida, Virginia and Ohio, Mr Romney returned on Monday night to New Hampshire, where he won the state’s first-in-the-nation primary in January, speaking to about 10,000 people at the Verizon Wireless arena.
Mr Romney, 65, assailed Mr Obama’s economic policies amid the recession, and promised to bring change that he asserted Obama had only talked about.
“Talk is cheap, but a record is real,” Mr Romney said. If elected, Mr Romney would be the first Mormon US president.
The final Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll, released on Monday, showed Mr Obama with support from 50% of likely voters to 47% for Mr Romney.
Fitting for a tight election, voters in tiny Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, split over the candidates, Mr Obama and Mr Romney receiving five votes each when balloting took place at midnight.
In nearby Hart’s Location, the hamlet that shares the traditional honour of casting the first presidential ballots on election day, Mr Obama won with 23 votes, Mr Romney received nine and Libertarian Gary Johnson received one.
More than 30 million absentee or early ballots have already been cast, including in excess of three million in Florida.
Mr Obama and Mr Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and the wealthy founder of a private equity firm, have spent months highlighting their sharp divisions over the role of government in Americans’ lives, in bringing down the stubbornly high unemployment rate, reducing the federal budget deficit and reducing the national debt.
The biggest focus has been on Ohio, an industrial state that has gone with the winner of the last 12 presidential elections, which both candidates visited on Monday. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio.
Both campaigns say the winner will be determined by which side is better at getting its supporters to the polls.
The forecast for election day promised dry weather for much of the country, with rain expected in two battlegrounds, Florida and Wisconsin. But the closing days of the campaign played out against ongoing recovery efforts after Superstorm Sandy.
Election officials in New York and New Jersey were scrambling to marshal generators, move voting locations, shuttle storm victims to polling places and take other steps to ensure everyone who wanted to vote could do so.
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