WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry entered a frenzied final week of campaigning, still locked in a dead heat in polls.
Kerry spent Sunday stumping around Florida -- a juicy electoral prize with 27 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election on November 2, and the state that controversially gave the last election to Bush.
His efforts in Florida won him the endorsements of every major newspaper in the state, the latest from the Orlando Sentinal, which said Kerry "would be a more bipartisan and effective leader than Mr Bush."
A Newsweek poll out Saturday showed Bush and Kerry tied nationally at 46 percent. But both Florida and New Mexico still have a significant margin of voters -- four to five percent -- up for grabs, according to local polls.
With opinion polls showing the candidates in a dead heat, a few hundred votes could determine the outcome of the race as it did in 2000, when a 537-vote lead in Florida gave Bush the presidency after five weeks of legal wrangling.
To win the White House, a candidate must amass 270 of 538 electoral votes allotted to the states following the popular vote.
Kerry's first stop Sunday was at a predominantly black church in Fort Lauderdale, where he attended services and sought to bolster his appeal to African-Americans, who the Massachusetts senator needs to turn out in strong numbers to shore up his base of core Democrats.
Bush, meanwhile, headed to the western state of New Mexico, which has only five electoral votes, a sign of how essential even small states could prove in an election that polls show is a statistical tie.
The president also picked up newspaper endorsements in Columbus and Cincinnati, cities in the hotly contested state of Ohio, where neither candidate has been able to establish a clear lead.
But The Washington Post threw its support behind Kerry, after The New York Times endorsed him last weekend.
"We believe Mr Kerry, with his promise of resoluteness tempered by wisdom and open-mindedness, has staked a stronger claim on the nation's trust to lead for the next four years," the Post said.
Former president Bill Clinton, whose retains a strong appeal among the Democratic party faithful, was set to join Kerry's starting Monday with a television interview and a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylavnia -- one of a handful of showdown states that could decide who wins on November 2.
Clinton was forced from the campaign trail to the hospital bed for heart surgery six weeks ago. His appearances Monday will be his first since the successful operation to bypass blocked arteries.
With just nine days left to the election, and early voting already underway in some states, both candidates have painted dire visions of the next four years if their rival were to win.
"I understand how dangerous this world is and it's essential that the American resident be resolute and firm as we deal with terrorists," Bush told Fox News, making his oft-repeated accusations that Kerry would be dangerously weak against terrorism, that he changed his mind on whether Saddam Hussein was a threat and whether the war in Iraq was worth it.
Kerry Saturday hammered away at Bush's claims that only he could be trusted to head off future terror attacks on the United States, saying the president let Osama bin Laden escape in the Afghan mountains in 2001.
"He outsourced the job of going after Bin Laden to Afghan warlords who one week earlier were fighting against us," the Massachusetts Democrat told an outdoor rally in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
10/24/2004 - 19:59 GMT - AFP