AS THE race for the White House enters its final hours, the race is hanging on a huge door-to-door ground war of competing armies of volunteers desperate to get their voters to the polls.
Democrats have 100 offices in Ohio with three visits to key voters scheduled on polling day, while Republicans claim have knocked on nearly a million doors in the past three weeks.
With neither candidate appearing to generate close to the enthusiasm behind President Barack Obama’s first run for office four years ago, nationally the face-off now pits the Democrats’ vast network of local offices against well-funded Republican efforts.
Zachary Bayer, who works with leading Republican analyst Frank Lunz, said the suburbs around Cleveland, Ohio’s biggest city, would be “really important”.
“It’s going to come down to turn-out on the Democratic side and Republican side in the Cleveland suburbs,” he predicted.
The huge interest in the race may have encouraged people to vote, say some. On other hand, the surge of negative advertising on both sides may depress it. Volunteers are using smart phones to pinpoint homes of some voters and targeting them with personalised e-mails.
Terry Penrod, a gay real-estate agent who lives in the heavily gay and lesbian community of Short North, in the city of Columbus, voted a month ago under early-voting rules and has since been focusing on getting friends to join him, including on Facebook, “reinforcing the strong idea about moving forward to my friends.”
On the day Mr Penrod will go canvassing. “If we know you’ve voted we can check you off the list and we don’t have to bug you,” he said yesterday.
“In my opinion, a gay person voting Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Saunders.”
Early voting has allowed activists at rallies on some days to bus voters directly to polling stations. They have been encouraged to vote early and then get others to the polls on the day.
Across the state, Democratic teams were placing voter guides on door-knobs the day before the poll. On the day, canvassers will go three times to the doors of known Democrat supporters.
“We don’t want to spend the day after the election wondering what would have happened if we had worked a little harder, “ said Don Daiker, a local team leader.
Michelle Obama told supporters at the weekend that in 2008 her husband won Ohio, with a population of five million, by 262,000 votes – “just 24 votes per precinct. That’s how this race works. That really could mean just one vote in the neighbourhood making a difference. All of us can swing an entire precinct for Obama”.
With just a few more hours of knocking on doors, she said, they should tell people that Obama was the president who ended the war in Iraq and “took out Osama bin Laden”.