US President George W Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry entered a frenzied final week of campaigning Sunday, 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.
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