Bush, Kerry make pitches to voters in key states.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Jill Zuckman and Mark Silva

DAYTON, Ohio _ They each tried to graft onto the success of the Boston Red Sox. They visited churches and delivered messages with strong religious echoes on the campaign stump. Their new adoptive homes of Ohio and Florida received even more personal attention.

But mostly, on Sunday, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry kept moving, as if one vote or a mere handful in a single precinct would determine the winner of this too-close-to-call presidential race.

The chase-the-sun, no-moment-to-lose nature of the campaigning reinforced what a raft of new national and, more importantly, battleground-state polls showed _ that the race continued to appear to be a statistical draw, and likely would be decided by modest swings of voters whom the campaigns are targeting with a surgical precision.

Each side dissected public and private polls as they made 11th-hour decisions on where to deploy resources on an Election Day that might capture those highly refined slices of the electorate and, with that, the White House. And officials in each campaign expressed a public confidence that betrayed a private anxiety.

Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, made a prediction Sunday night: "We will win Florida and Ohio." Bush won both states in 2000. Rove added, "We will take at least two or three or four states that were won by (Al) Gore in the last election."

The president's campaign pumped computer-generated phone calls from Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling into New Hampshire while the Kerry campaign trumpeted the backing of the team's owner and general manager.