WASHINGTON: Political strategists and pollsters refer to them as the “Triple A” states, the handful that will determine the outcome of this election and where Barack Obama and John McCain are focusing their energy, best people and cash over the final days.Identifying the states is easy: they are the ones that in the last few weeks have received the highest number of visits from the candidates, the biggest volume of advertising and where the campaign teams have placed their best staff.

Huge swaths of the US, from reliably Democratic California to solidly Democratic New York are ignored, as are Republican bastions such as Texas. Instead, campaign foot soldiers are battling from dawn to midnight in a relatively small number of states and, in most cases, in a small number of counties within those states.

Mark Mellman, a pollster for the John Kerry campaign in 2004, identified these toss-up states as Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, traditionally big swing states, but also new ones that until a few weeks ago would have been regarded as safely Republican, Virginia and Missouri.

“These are the Triple A states,” Mellman said. Also on the list is Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina, which was an even more unlikely swing state a few weeks ago than Virginia. “Any of these could be decisive,” said Mellman.

McCain’s hopes of taking the White House have dwindled to one state, Pennsylvania, which voted Democratic in 2004. He needs to take this and hold on to Ohio, the key to the midwest where Obama is ahead in the polls, and Florida, where the two candidates are in a dead heat.

Obama, having made inroads into a host of Republican states, has many more options. If he does not make it in one state, there are a host of others that could still swing the election his way.

McCain spent Thursday in Florida – as hotly contested as Pennsylvania – and Obama was there for two days earlier this week. Both men are certain to return to the Sunshine state at least once in the final week – Pennsylvania and Ohio also.

Since the official start of the campaign on September 5, Ohio and Florida have each been visited 20 times by Obama or McCain or their running mates. Pennsylvania has been visited 16 times, Virginia 13, and Colorado and Missouri 11 times each. New Hampshire and North Carolina have both had seven, Nevada and New Mexico five, Indiana four and Maine one.

The other indicator to which states are the most hotly contested is spending on advertising. Evan Tracey, the president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad spending, said the presidential race always whittles down to a few states. “In every one of these states advertising is very heavy. These are the states they know they have to win.”

The difference in the 2008 campaign is that Obama’s encroachment into traditionally Republican areas means that McCain is having to spend money in states traditionally his party thought it could take for granted.

“Obama has McCain exactly where he wants him. McCain’s team would not have planned on fighting in North Carolina in October. He would rather be spending money elsewhere,” Tracey said.

Republican and Democratic strategists involved in past campaigns say the pace will become even more frenetic in the final days, with planned schedules altered at the last minute based on overnight polls.

Pennsylvania appears to be an odd choice for McCain to make what is effectively his last stand. Many analysts and pollsters, such as Mellman, no longer include Pennsylvania in their lists of battleground states because Obama is regarded as so far ahead: two polls on Thursday placed him ahead by 10 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.

But Mark Salter, McCain’s chief strategist, told reporters in the state on Tuesday: “When we look at our numbers, we think we’re competitive here.”

Democrats in Pennsylvania agree. Its Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, sent a memo this week to Obama’s headquarters warning that the state is traditionally volatile. Rendell, who went into election day for the governorship in 2002 with a 25 per cent lead but won by nine per cent, urged Obama to make more visits to the state.

Karlyn Bowman, an election analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative thinktank in Washington, said Obama would win the election but she understood why McCain was concentrating on Pennsylvania.

“Remember how well Hillary Clinton did there,” Bowman said, recalling Clinton’s victory over Obama in the state earlier this year, mainly with the support of white, blue-collar workers.

In Florida campaign teams are concentrating on a relatively narrow strip, the Orlando-Tampa corridor. Registration figures there for July indicate just how tight it is, with 159,000 recorded Republicans and 157,000 Democrats.

Another indication of the fierceness of the fight is that the ratio of negative ads by McCain and Obama is higher in that area than any other part of the country.

Obama can lose Florida and still win by taking states such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia, all of which voted Republican last time. Virginia would be a big prize; a southern state that has voted Democrat only once since 1948, and that was for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Michael Dimock, an associate director of research at the Washington-based Pew Institute, said that in 2000 and 2004 the number of battleground states remained basically the same from the start of the campaign to election day. But this campaign had turned out to be more fluid as polls showed Obama becoming competitive in traditionally Republican areas. States such as Michigan, that had been competitive at the start, and which received more visits than any other, had since dropped out of the contest, with McCain giving them up as lost.

Dimock sees the potential changes in the offing comparable to Bill Clinton’s win in 1996 and Johnson’s in 1964, all the more remarkable given that they were southern politicians and Obama is from the north.

Though the intense campaigning taking place in the battleground states in 2008 mattered, it was less important than the economic meltdown and the unpopularity of George Bush. Said Dimock. “Even in the best circumstances, it would be hard for McCain to do well.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service