KEY POINTS:
A defiant John McCain has dismissed polling numbers that continue to show him trailing Barack Obama both nationally and in several key battleground states, predicting that, when all the ballots are counted after voting one week tomorrow, he will emerge as the new president of the United States.
"You are going to be up very late on election night," Senator McCain told Tom Brokaw of NBC's Meet the Press on location in Iowa, one of several states that might normally vote Republican but which seems now to be tilting heavily towards Mr Obama.
"I guarantee you that, two weeks from now, you will see it will have been a very close race and I believe we are going to win."
The McCain-Palin ticket continues to fight against the headwinds created not just by the relentless barrage of discouraging polling numbers but also by the superior spending power of Mr Obama as well as a lengthening list of newspaper editorial boards siding against them and with the Democratic candidate.
Fighting despondency, Republicans remember that Mr McCain has often thrived as the political underdog and staged comebacks that only he has believed in, most notably last summer when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination was completely out of cash and had widely been written off as hopeless.
A new poll in Iowa gave Mr Obama a 54 to 39 per cent lead over Mr McCain.
A Boston Globe poll in New Hampshire put Mr Obama ahead by the same margin.
But Mr McCain said that his own campaign had polls showing him "three or four points behind", a gap that could yet be closed.
"We are going to win, it's going to be tight," he said.
He cited a new Zogby-Reuters poll released yesterday that gave Mr Obama only a five-point edge, after enjoying a 12-point margin just last Thursday.
Asked about his efforts in recent days to defend his running mate Sarah Palin from criticism even from within his own party, Mr McCain swiftly fired back, "I don't defend her, I praise her."
Even as he was speaking, however, residents of Alaska, where Mrs Palin is Governor, were awaking to find that the state's largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News had endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket.
Mr McCain used the NBC interview again to distance himself from President George Bush.
However, he acknowledged that he and Mr Bush "share a common philosophy of the Republican Party".
It was a comment that Mr Obama, campaigning in Colorado at the same time instantly seized upon.
- INDEPENDENT
