Washington: Unleashing the most aggressive voter-mobilisation drives in the history of US Presidential politics, incumbent George W Bush and his challenger John Kerry criss-crossed through the crucial battlegrounds of Florida and Ohio wooing potential voters in a final bid to tilt the balance in their favour in tomorrow's (Nov 2, 2004) elections.

The two campaigns will contact millions of Americans, many of them more than once in the final hours of the campaign and then track their movements throughout Election Day to ensure they have gone to the polls.

The unprecedented efforts underscore the conviction of officials in both campaigns that with the race so close in so many States, the key to victory depends more than in any recent campaign on their ability to win the battle of the streets, 'The Washington Post' reported.

Addressing a series of campaign rallies, both leaders promised Americans to keep their homeland safe.

Kerry promised that if elected he would undertake an unprecedented "flurry of activity" to protect national security that would include quick Cabinet appointments. "I am going to make America safer and I have some very strong and real steps to take quite immediately to make that happen," Kerry was quoted as saying by the US media.

Bush said, "If you believe America should fight the war on terror with all her might and lead with unwavering confidence, I ask you come stand by me."

Both the parties had lined up armies of volunteers in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico to woo as many voters as possible.

In Ohio, Democrats said they had 27,000 people working phone banks and made 399,446 calls over the weekend. A Bush campaign official said they were contacting 400,000 people a day in Ohio as well. In Pennsylvania, the Bush campaign planned to contact 2 million voters till Election Day.

The weekend campaign blitz represented the culmination of many months of preparation by the campaign managers, which along with their outside allies will spend more than $300 million targeting and turning out their voters, the report said.

Bush's Budget for voter mobilization is about $125 million, at least triple that of four years ago, a knowledgeable official said. Kerry's field operation, run out of the Democratic National Committee, will spend nearly $60 million, more than doubling what the Democrats spent in 2000, campaign officials said.

With passions running high, the campaigns have tapped volunteers with no previous involvement in politics to supplement campaign veterans. In Wisconsin, union foremen from Atlanta are working out of a storefront office in Appleton. In Iowa, Kathleen Jorgensen, 37, a mother of two, has spent hours of her weekends going door to door. In Florida, Wallace Klussman, one of 1,500 members of the Texas Strike Force that has fanned out to the battlegrounds, spent the weekend canvassing for Bush.

Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman said yesterday (Oct 31, 2004) that Republicans built their operation on the belief that neighbour-to-neighbour or colleague-to-colleague contact is far more persuasive than relying on paid canvassers who have no personal connections to the voters they are wooing.

Republicans built their ground operation on the successful mobilization plan of 2002.