President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney criss-crossed America yesterday, appealing for votes in an agonising two-day dash for the US presidency that both sides claimed was just within their grasp.

Romney’s run included a surprise foray into Pennsylvania, a Democratic-leaning state that Republican strategists said was breaking his way. Obama’s advisers, however, dismissed the thrust as a sign of desperation.

Democrats said they were confident of Obama’s small but steady lead in the key swing states that are likely to decide the election, but acknowledged that everything now depends on getting the vote out tomorrow.

“Ultimately, it’s up to you. You have the power,” Obama said at a rally in Concord, New Hampshire. “You will be shaping the decisions for this country for decades to come right now, in the next two days.”

Romney, on his last stop in Iowa before the elections, implored supporters: “I need Iowa, I need Iowa, I need Iowa so we can win the White House and take back America.”

Romney was also visiting Ohio and Virginia yesterday as he and Obama burned up jet fuel hopping between the battleground states that will decide who has the White House for the next four years.

Obama flew to New Hampshire to reprise a buddy act from the night before with Bill Clinton, which saw the popular former president place his economic legacy on the younger man’s shoulders.

On a gruelling swing that will end in Wisconsin tomorrow, Obama was also travelling to Florida, Colorado and Ohio yesterday.

Campaign aides pointed at early voting advantages in states such as Ohio and Florida as evidence that Obama is close to sealing the deal in his quest to become only the second Democrat since World War II to get a second term.

“Early vote’s gone very well for us. We think we’re closing with strong momentum,” Obama adviser David Plouffe told ABC.

As the race boils down to a handful of votes in a handful of states both sides are trumpeting their organisational skills and get-out-the-vote drive as decisive.

“Number one, their ground game is not superior,” Romney aide Ed Gillespie told CNN. “And, number two, I think those undecided voters are going to turn out, and they’re going to break pretty strongly against the President.”

Romney was spending time in Pennsylvania because the momentum was shifting in his favour even in states with bedrock Democratic constituencies, Gillespie said.

But Obama’s team said Romney’s raid was an acknowledgement that he can no longer put together the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election in the real swing states.

“Listen, this is a desperate ploy at the end of a campaign,” said Plouffe on ABC’s This Week. “I think a lot of this is a smokescreen, to try and mask the fact that in the places that will decide this election from an Electoral College standpoint – Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin – it’s going to be close, but they are definitely in a weak position before election day.”

Pennsylvania has been in Obama’s column for months, with the latest Real Clear Politics average of polls showing the incumbent up 4.1 percentage points in a state he won handily, by more than 10 per cent, in 2008.

His voice husky from endless rallies, Obama seemed to come to a wistful public realisation that after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, heading interminable rallies and travelling for months, his fate was no longer in his own hands.

“I’m just a prop of the campaign,” Obama told a crowd of 24,000 people on a chilly Saturday night in an outdoor concert venue in Bristow, Virginia. “The power is not with us anymore, the planning, everything we do, it doesn’t matter.

“It’s all up to you, it’s up to the volunteers... you have got the power,” he said.

Clinton told the crowd in Bristow that Obama had done his best with “a bad hand” and deserved to be re-elected, as, in his folksy southern way, he went about dismantling Romney’s record and his ability to serve as president.

A valuable character witness for Obama, Clinton will headline four rallies for Obama today in Pennsylvania, to counter Romney’s late push into the state.

With two days to go in a race that has turned on Obama’s economic record and Romney’s past as a venture capitalist, the candidates are closely matched. They are effectively tied in national polls of the popular vote but Obama appears to be in a stronger position in the battleground states, and if the polls are accurate, seems to be in position to win re-election.

The latest ABC News/Washington Post survey showed the race for the White House tied, with both Obama and Romney receiving 48-per cent support among likely voters.

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