DAYTONA BEACH, United States (AFP) - President George W. Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry traded blows on key domestic issues and criss-crossed battleground states hoping to sway undecided voters as the campaign clock ticks down.
Bush signed a law aimed at battling global anti-Semitism aboard his Air Force One presidential airplane on his way to this key battleground state, which has a large Jewish population that campaign aides hope to win over come the November 2 election.
"This nation will keep watch; we will make sure that the ancient impulse of anti-Semitism never finds a home in the modern world," said the president, who carried the state in 2000 by just 537 votes.
Florida, which decided that national contest, boasts the third-largest Jewish population behind Israel and New York, and owns 27 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
"Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Senator Kerry's vote against funding our troops," the president told a cheering crowd of thousands in a sports arena here. "He abandoned our troops in combat by voting against the funding."
For months, Bush has quoted with relish Kerry's clumsy but accurate explanation that he voted in favor of the 87 billion dollar funding measure for Iraq and Afghanistan in procedural vote before voting against final passage.
"He said the whole thing was a complicated matter. There's nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat," said Bush, who secured the presidency by carrying this state by 537 votes in the disputed 2000 election.
Florida's 27 electoral votes make it the richest prize among the dozen or so states that are truly up for grabs in the November 2 election.
Recent polls have shown Bush and Kerry deadlocked in Florida, which Bush is scheduled to visit again on Monday and Tuesday -- and probably several more times before US voters go to the polls.
Kerry spent Saturday stumping in the midwestern state of Ohio, sometimes called the bellwether state because no Republican president ever won without carrying Ohio. Kerry has been there 22 times since March. Bush also won Ohio in the 2000 election against Al Gore.
The two rivals used their respective national radio addresses early Saturday to take aim at each other's domestic policies.
Kerry blasted Bush over his 2001 decision to limit federal funding to the research of existing stem cell lines.
Scientists believe embryonic stem cell research may lead to cures for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and to ways to repair crippling spinal cord injuries.
Kerry said Bush has "made the wrong choice to sacrifice science for extreme right-wing ideology."
Bush said in his radio address that Kerry "voted 10 times against medical liability reform, and now his health care proposal calls for bigger, more intrusive government.
An ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll of 1,203 likely voters taken October 12-14 showed the two contenders tied at 48 percent. The latest Zogby International survey showed Bush opening a 48-percent to 44-percent edge among likely voters, with a margin of error of 2.9 percent.
A Time magazine poll came to the same conclusions, giving Bush a 48-46 percent edge, less than the four percent margin of error, among 865 likely voters.
Kerry told an audience at a school in Xenia, southern Ohio, "When it comes to reality, George Bush has a simple strategy: Ignore it, deny it, then try to hide it."
He pointed to a local newspaper's headline of more violence in Iraq, and to what he called Bush's refusal to change course.
"We have got more terrorists there than we ever had there when we went in and more territory ceded to them, but George Bush just keeps saying we are making progress there," he said.
"This guy is never in doubt, but frequently in error."
In a new swipe at Bush's muscular foreign policy, Kerry renewed his pledge to return the United States to the internationalism that marked its foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century.
"The world is waiting for the United States of America they know and love," Kerry said.
Kerry told some 5,000 supporters, braving chilly temperatures and sleet, that their judgement on election day would be watched around the globe.