REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL candidate John McCain will campaign this weekend in traditionally strong Republican states in a bid to counter the lead of Democratic rival Barack Obama in local opinion polls.
The decision by Mr McCain to target Florida, North Carolina and Virginia comes as the latest "poll of opinion" polls shows that he is trailing his Democratic opponent by five percentage points with just three weeks to go. Mr McCain lost leads in opinion polls in all three states in the past month.
He will be supported in Florida by the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman, who has strong support from the state's Jewish community.
Campaigning in Virginia yesterday, Mr Obama accused his Republican rival of wanting to cut $882 billion (€657.3 billion) from the Medicare budget, which would leave pensioners paying more for medicine. "It's entirely consistent with Senator McCain's record during his 26 years in Congress where, time and again, he has opposed Medicare," he said during a rally in Roanoke, Virginia.
The latest poll in the state, which has not supported a Democrat for more than 40 years and which has seen an extra 500,000 register to cast their vote on November 4th in the past six months, gives Mr Obama a six percentage point lead.
The Democrat will campaign in North Carolina this weekend, where he is now ahead by two percentage points, and in Missouri, where he is ahead by eight points - well outside the margin of error.
Meanwhile, Mr McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, attacked Mr Obama for not criticising a community organisation umbrella group which has run a voter registration drive that put an extra 1.3 million on the electoral roll.
It has emerged that some staff at the organisation, Acorn, made up names, used telephone directories and submitted duplicate applications. So far, Mr Obama, who worked closely with Acorn's Chicago branch during his time as a community organiser there, has put some distance between his campaign and the organisation.
Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court has backed Ohio election officials in an ongoing dispute over allegations of voter registration fraud. The court overruled a federal appeals court ruling that the top election official, a Democrat, be ordered to verify registration applications from people whose social security or driving licence number did not match records held in other government offices.
The justices did not deal with the merits of the case and ruled only that the Republicans were not entitled to take such an action.
The party had accused Democrats of abetting voter fraud; they in turn accused Republicans of trying to disenfranchise poor voters.
Some 200,000 of the 666,000 Ohio voters have lodged applications since January 1st that do not match other official records, although Ohio election officials said most discrepancies were innocent clerical errors.
The difficulties now facing the McCain bid are illustrated by the Republican national committee's decision to end its television advertising campaign in Maine, where Mr Obama is between six and 14 percentage points ahead.
Maine is a traditionally Democratic state and last voted for a Republican in 1988, when Kennebunkport summer resident George HW Bush won the state.
Mr McCain, in an automated telephone message sent to voters in Nevada, Wisconsin, and other targeted states, once again accused his opponent of being linked to William Ayers, the 1960s Weather Underground bomber. In it, he says Mr Obama has "worked closely with Bill Ayers, whose organisation bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans".
During a lighter moment, the two candidates exchanged jokes at a New York dinner on Thursday night, also attended by Hillary Clinton and other senior political players. "I can't shake that feeling that some people here are pulling for me," Mr McCain said, turning to the side of the stage. "I'm delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary."
Joking about Mr McCain's advertising campaign, which asks, "Who is the real Barack Obama?", the Democrat said: "I actually was not born in a manger. I was born on Krypton," before adding, "I got my middle name [Hussein] from somebody who obviously didn't think I would ever run for president."