Despite polls showing him trailing Democrat Barack Obama by double digits in Pennsylvania, John McCain continued to treat the state as if the whole election depended on it.
Yesterday, his wife, Cindy, made four stops in Philadelphia and Yardley, speaking at two rallies, visiting a hospital, and meeting the mothers of men and women in the military.
Today, the Republican nominee has three appearances in Pennsylvania, starting with a morning rally in Bensalem. He made two visits to the Philadelphia suburbs last week, and running mate Sarah Palin was in Lancaster over the weekend.
"It sure doesn't sound like a campaign that's pulling up stakes," said Chris Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown.
All the McCain activity is happening in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.2 million, double from four years ago; where Obama, flush with cash, is outspending McCain on television by several orders of magnitude; and where the Democrats have an organizational advantage.
Indeed, Obama - who announced last night that he will leave the campaign trail Thursday and Friday to visit his suddenly seriously ill grandmother in Hawaii - apparently feels comfortable enough about his position in Pennsylvania that he has no plans to return to the state before the middle of next week.
G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, said of the McCain campaign: "I think they're still here because they can't get out. They can't pull out because it would be psychologically devastating to their campaign nationally."
The last five public polls have Obama ahead in the state by 12 to 15 points.
McCain's aides say they remain optimistic about their chances in Pennsylvania for the same reasons they focused on it in the first place.
Although the state went Democratic in the last four presidential elections, the margins of victory were modest. The state has a lot of older, socially conservative voters with whom Obama has struggled, and Obama ran poorly in the Democratic primary.
State party leaders also believe they have a chance to do well enough in parts of South and Northeast Philadelphia to hold down Obama's margin of victory in the city.
With the Democratic ticket leading in many of the states President Bush carried in 2004, McCain needs a blue-state breakthrough.
"We will win Pennsylvania, and those 21 electoral votes will be the margin that puts us over the top," campaign spokesman Peter Feldman said. "We wouldn't be here unless we were 100 percent confident of that."
The good news for McCain is that the national polls seem to have tightened somewhat. From a peak last week of more than seven percentage points, Obama's average lead stood slightly above five yesterday.
Obama said in an interview on NBC's Today Show: "We think that the race will tighten, just because that's what happens at the end of campaigns."
In the same interview, Obama said Gen. Colin Powell, who endorsed him Sunday, would serve "as one of my advisers," with or without a formal role, should Obama become president.
McCain spent the day in Missouri, which President Bush carried in 2000 and 2004. There, he seized on comments made Sunday night in Seattle by Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Democratic vice presidential nominee warned that if Obama were elected, "we're going to have an international crisis" within six months, "a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
Said McCain: "We don't want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars."
Obama campaigned yesterday in Tampa, Fla., where he was introduced by David Price, the pitcher who saved the game that sent the Tampa Bay Rays into the World Series against the Phillies.
"I've said from the beginning that I am a unity candidate, bringing people together," Obama said. "So when you see a White Sox fan showing love to the Rays, and the Rays showing some love back, you know we are onto something right here."
When he campaigned in Philadelphia during the National League Championship Series between the Phillies and the Dodgers, Obama said he was rooting for the Phils.
Obama also talked about the criticism from McCain over Obama's plan to revoke the Bush tax cuts for individuals making at least $200,000 and families making $250,000, and to give a tax cut to all working people who make less.
The Democrat noted that McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 on the grounds that they benefited the wealthy rather than middle-class Americans in need of relief.
"Well, he was right then, and I am right now," said Obama, whose Florida visit coincided with the start of early voting in the state.
Later in the day, former Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton joined Obama at a rally in Orlando, where more than 50,000 people gathered outside a sports arena to see them side by side. It was the first time the bitter primary opponents had appeared together since a pair of fund-raisers in July.
The two played off a Republican theme by saying this election's theme should be "jobs, baby, jobs" for people hurting in the economic crisis. The GOP has coined the chant "drill, baby, drill," referring instead to oil and gas exploration.
Later, as Obama spoke, he picked up the chant at his audience's urging. "Jobs, baby, jobs - you like that, don't you?" he said to cheers.
In Philadelphia yesterday, Cindy McCain traversed the area in the company of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the wives of two Republican senators and two Republican governors.
At a rally at the National Constitution Center, she warned against the dangers of having Democrats in charge of the House, the Senate and the presidency, and praised her husband's qualifications for chief executive, saying: "He may not be a man for all times . . . but he's certainly a man for these times."
Yesterday, the McCain campaign said it had $47 million cash on hand at the start of October, out of the $84 million in federal funds it received in September for its general-election campaign. The Obama campaign, which rejected federal funding, said Sunday it raised $150 million in September alone.
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