After years of planning, billions in TV ads, millions of air miles, countless motorcades and three game-changing debates, it still comes down to Ohio.
The Buckeye State still remains a toss-up. Whichever way it goes will likely determine the winner. A good place to watch for clues is Stark County, which has an uncanny record of predicting the outcome in this most crucial of battleground states. And Stark comes down to voters like Chris Toxie and Paul Sommers.
Sommers, 62, a retired county worker, voted for Democrat Barack Obama four years ago. But Republican Mitt Romney got his vote this time. His son has been out of college for three years but starts his first full-time job on Monday, as a $US15-an-hour ($A14.50) manager at a sporting goods chain. He had to move to North Carolina for the promotion from part-time sales.
In 2008, Obama "spoke (on) a lot of the issues that concern me and I thought I'd give him a chance," Sommers said after casting an early ballot last week. "I've seen little in the way of progress."
Toxie, 49, can relate, though Obama got his early ballot. His 18-year-old son barely escaped the fast food industry when a company that installs countertops took him on a few weeks ago.
"Things are better. But it's not great. It's hard for people to get jobs, not where you can learn a trade," said Toxie who repairs printers and copiers for a living.
"I just don't want to go back to the way it was before. I kind of think the Republicans got us into this mess and we ought to give Obama a longer chance to get us back out."
Ohio has picked every winner since 1964, by far the nation's longest winning streak. It's more than a good predictor: With 18 electoral votes, it's also a critical battleground.
No Republican has won the White House without it. Most recent polls have shown Obama inching ahead, but Romney has remained within reach.
Conventional wisdom holds that Obama will do well in northwest Ohio, where the auto industry he rescued is most prevalent, and in the industrial northeast.
Romney will rake in plenty of votes in suburban Cleveland and the Bible Belt in southwestern Ohio.
Central Ohio, with the capital and many suburbanites, is a toss-up. So is the southeast corner - coal country, with social conservative rural residents and Democrat-oriented blue collar workers.
Stark County sits at the transition between northeast and southeast. From factories to fracking, blighted neighbourhoods in Canton to million-dollar mansions, suburban strip malls to rolling farmland, it has a bit of everything that makes up the state.
It's not exactly the Rust Belt. It's a melange and a microcosm, of the state and the nation.
"It's kind of the gateway," said David Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. "It's demographics. It's economics. It's just a really interesting mix."
With 375,000 residents out of 11.5 million statewide, no one thinks Stark County alone will tip the outcome. But it's a great place to gauge how it looks.
Bottom line: hard to say.
"It's going to be slim here in the county," said Janet Creighton, a county commissioner who was president George W Bush's liaison to local government after serving as Canton's mayor.
"I have not seen this level of enthusiasm and energy since 2000. People are tired of what they have ... People are struggling."
Romney strategists assert that independent voters in Ohio have abandoned Obama, putting the state within reach. "Right now, their firewall is burning," said Rich Beeson, Romney's political director.
Obama strategist David Axelrod took strong issue with that. "There's a growing recognition on the other side that Ohio is fading away," he said.
Stark County has sided with the winner in 10 of the last dozen presidential contests, and in nine of those it came within two percentage points of the statewide tally. Its biggest flub was in 2004, when Senator John Kerry lost Ohio 51 per cent-49 per cent but carried the county by 3100 votes out of nearly 200,000.
Unemployment in the county peaked at 13.5 per cent in early 2010 - two points worse than Ohio as a whole - but has subsided to 6.5 per cent at last report. That's better than the state and national averages.
Both sides have worked the area hard. Vice President Joe Biden swept into Canton two weeks ago. Romney held a Friday night rally at a North Canton high school a few days later.
The Obama campaign has three offices in the county, in Canton, Massillon and Alliance.
"They have a huge ground game," said Randy Gonzalez, the county Democratic chairman. And, he argued, the environment favours the president. "Jobs are picking up around here. There's a lot of people going back to work."
Republican volunteers have been going door-to-door since the end of May.
"It's going to be a nail-biter," said Jane Timken, vice chairwoman of the Stark County GOP. "We have a good shot at it. More than a good shot."
However, a certain ambivalence prevails, which makes it hard to tell which side will be able to rally more voters to the polls.
Sommers, who lives in Navarre in the rural southwest corner of Stark County, gave up on Obama but isn't thrilled about the alternative. "I don't know that I feel a lot of attachment to the other guy," he said.
And it would be an overstatement to call Toxie and his wife, Theresa, fired up over the president, even though he got their votes.
"He's done OK," Theresa Toxie said. "I don't think Republicans are going to make changes that are going to help middle class folks like us. Never have."
