President Obama's Final Push: "If You Vote, I Will Win"

Story by ABC News
Written by Gregory J. Krieg
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/obama-romney-blitz-battleground-states-day-campaign/story?id=17639023

The candidates are spending the final few hours of this long presidential campaign season bouncing around the country, rallying supporters at 15 events across nine battleground states.

By late afternoon, President Obama had hit urban centers in Wisconsin and Ohio, with Iowa to come tonight.

"We have enough voters to win, it's just a matter of whether they show up," President Obama told Syndication One News-Talk Networks' radio talk show host Warren Ballentine earlier in the day. "Obviously there are going to be some voters who at this late date may still be undecided, and if they are, I am making a closing argument... But the main thing I want everybody to understand is that the number of undecided voters at this point is much smaller than the number of voters who support me but just aren't voting."

Bruce Springsteen, who admitted today Obama's performance in the first debate "freaked" him out, has been traveling with the president, heating up chilly crowds as his opening act. Jay-Z joined the festivities at a lunchtime gathering in Columbus, Ohio, where he swapped in "Mitt" for "B****" when performing his popular song, "99 Problems." 

(Mark Hirsch/Getty Images) President Barack Obama waves to supporters...

Like the President, Mitt Romney is making yet another play for the Buckeye State, arriving in Columbus four hours after President Obama leaves it for Iowa. It will be the Republican's fourth stop in a day that has seen him track north from Florida -- where the wait to register an early vote this weekend lasted as long as six hours -- to Virginia, finishing up in New Hampshire, where Kid Rock will provide the musical accompaniment.

"Your voices are being heard all over the nation, loud and clear, thank you," Romney said this morning in Vicksburg, Va. "I also want to thank many of you in this crowd that have been out there working on the campaign. Making calls from the victory centers, and by putting up a yard sign… in your neighbor's yard."

Ann Romney was in the spirit, too, greeting a raucous crowd in Fairfax, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., with a teasing question: "Are we going to be neighbors soon?"

Jokes aside, Romney is still campaigning seriously hard, revealing today he will visit Cleveland, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Penn., on Election Day, before heading home, as planned, to his Boston headquarters. Obama is not expected to leave the Chicago area Tuesday, but will be active on the airwaves, doing about a dozen local TV and radio interviews.

If the Romney ticket doesn't win enough votes to unseat President Obama Tuesday night, it won't be because Paul Ryan was a lazy campaigner. The vice presidential candidate is making his way through five scheduled stops today, covering five different states and four time zones. He closes out the election season back home, with a late-night rally in Milwaukee, Wis.

From Hard Political Facts to Historical Indicators, Follow the Election Night Signs

While the candidates push their supporters to the polls and smile for the cameras in what they expect to be packed arenas, parks, and airplane hangars -- at least seven of the events will be hosted at airports -- there have been some rumblings from Republicans, GOP strategist Karl Rove among them, that Romney's campaign might have been dealt an insurmountable blow by Superstorm Sandy.

"The hurricane is what broke Romney's [post-debate] momentum," former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said on CNN Sunday morning. "Any day that the news media is not talking about jobs and the economy, taxes and spending, deficit and debt, 'Obamacare' and energy, is a good day for Barack Obama."

The Romney campaign, though, insists it is traveling steadily along a well-charted course to victory Tuesday.
"I don't look at what happened with the storm and how it affected so many people through a political lens," Romney adviser Kevin Madden said Sunday. "We are focused on what we can do to make sure that the enthusiasm that we have seen in states, that it's part of helping our get-out-the-vote efforts in all these key battlegrounds and then just focusing on the message. So I wouldn't entertain the same notion that those folks did."

And Romney made one last argument in Cleveland Sunday for dismissing Obama from office after a single term. “He promised to do so very much, but, frankly, he fell so very short,” Romney said. “He promised to be a post-partisan President, but he’s been most partisan; he’s been divisive, blaming, attaching, dividing. And by the way

It’s not only Republicans that he refused to listen to; he also refused to listen to independent voices,” Obama seems to have taken on a more fatalistic approach, telling 14,000 supporters in New Hampshire Sunday that the election was in their hands, joking that he'd be little more than a "prop" the rest of the way.

"It's now up to you," he said, former President Bill Clinton once more on hand to warm up the chilly crowd. "That's how a Democracy works, right? That ultimately, it's up to you. You have the power. You are shaping the decisions for this country for decades to come. Right now. In the next two days."

But that doesn't mean the Democrats are done trying to convince voters how to exercise that power. ABC News obtained a set of talking points distributed by the party to surrogates for their last round of chatter with the media.

Among the lines you can expect to hear today: "We know and trust President Obama. We know what he believes, where he stands, and that he's willing to make tough decisions even when they're not politically convenient. We know he'll fight for middle-class families every single day, as hard as he knows how."

They've also been asked to deliver one last round of attacks on the Republican challenger.

"Gov. Romney has been using his talents as a salesman to dress up the same policies that failed our country and crashed our economy," according to the talking-points memo, "and offers them up as change."

Devin Dwyer and Emily Friedman contributed to this report