US presidential candidates are rushing in a frantic last minute effort to win battleground states in a bid to assemble the 270 electoral votes needed for election on Tuesday.
A news NBC survey showed the race remains too close to call, with Republican George W. Bush at 47 percent, Democrat Al Gore at 44 percent and Green Party nominee Ralph Nader at 4 percent.
Bush appears to have retained his slender lead in the national polls going into the final campaign day, following Sunday's all-day canvassing in Florida, a fiercely-contested state run by his brother, Governor Jeb Bush.
Gore, who on Saturday acknowledged he needed a boost when he asked voters in Memphis, Tennessee, to "breathe life into this campaign" was on a non-stop swing through five key states, starting with Pennsylvania.
"I think there's no question this is an election that is going to the finish line on Tuesday, and this is probably the only election in modern presidential times when we really don't know the outcome," said Gore campaign chairman William Daley.
Analysts say that so far, polls are unable to predict a winner.
Both the Bush and Gore camps know that the race will be determined by who wins the popular vote in a dozen or so toss-up states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Missouri, said the agency.
With that in mind, Gore will embark on 30 sleepless hours of campaigning starting before daybreak in Waterloo, Iowa Monday, with stops in Missouri, Michigan, and Florida.
Bush will head from Florida to Tennessee, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas and Texas, his home base.
The destinations are carefully chosen.
Each US state sends to the Electoral College, the institution that picks the president, a number of electors equal to its representations in Congress.
Gore or Bush must receive 270 electors out of 538, an absolute majority, to win on Tuesday.
Daley, speaking on CBS, predicted victory for the vice president in Florida, as well as Tennessee, while admitting that the race was too close for comfort for Gore.
Thousands of volunteers from both camps fanned out across the battleground states where potential voters were bombarded by telephone calls and last-minute TV ads.
President Bill Clinton, whom Vice President Gore has kept at arm's length for most of the campaign, was working the stump in Arkansas, another of the dozen or so swing states, with six electoral votes, while black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson was out campaigning on Gore's behalf, AFP said.
Meanwhile, Green party candidate Ralph Nader at a campaign rally in Washington Sunday refused to bow to abort his Green Party presidential run in toss-up states where his candidacy could cause Gore to lose to Bush.
"The Democratic Party tells labor and minorities 'you have nowhere else to go,'" Nader told an enthusiastic crowd of mostly young people.
"What a choice - between the bad and the worse. This country deserves the best," he told the crowd of some 12,000 mostly young people, according to the agency.
The Gore campaign admitted Sunday that the threat from Nader was real in key battleground states, particularly in the western United States.
"There's no question, if you have a candidate who doesn't have a chance of winning getting four or five or six percent, that may make the difference in some states," Daley said.
Gore, in the dying hours of the campaign, has pared down his message to a few clear sound bites, key among them being that Bush is unfit to lead and his policies of big tax breaks will ruin unprecedented US prosperity.
In reply, Bush accuses Gore of scare tactics, questions his integrity, and presents himself as a unifier.
"We need to get rid of the politics of anger, we need a fresh start after a season of cynicism," he said in West Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday.
From both camps, however, comes the same desperate clamor for voters to turn out on polling day.
It appears that the campaign flap over Bush's drunken-driving conviction has tailed off, with polls showing it had done little damage to his chances.
However, Daley was forced on the defensive by charges from the Bush campaign that Gore had equated a vote for the Texas governor with a vote for evil.
Bush took exception Saturday to comments made by Gore at a prayer breakfast led by black church leaders in Memphis, Tennessee, when Gore said: "Deep within us, we each have the capacity for good and for evil. I am taught that good overcomes evil if we choose that outcome."
Daley insisted that the remark had nothing to do with Bush and was addressed instead the age-old struggle between good and evil inside every individual.
According to AFP, Bush made no reference to the issue as he opened his final campaign blitz in Jacksonville, Florida - Albawaba.com
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
