The state that won it for Bush in 2000 could doom McCain

They could have heard it halfway to the Moon, the roar of relief and pride at Tropicana Field as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays overcame the Boston Red Sox on Sunday night for a place in the 2008 baseball World Series. The Rays have a fine record of failure so no one minded the ecstatic chant that went up from their supporters: "From worst to first."

John McCain must be hoping he can pull off a similar turn-around. For the latest polling data shows that the crucial prize of Florida may be slipping away from the Republican's grasp two weeks from election day. The principle reason is not hard to divine. Hit by the housing crisis and job losses, Floridians have seen their state slip in short order from boom to bust – or, indeed, from first to worst.

Losing Florida, which has the fourth-largest trove of the Electoral College votes that determine who takes the keys to the White House, is not an option for the Republicans. This is the state that won the race for George Bush in 2000 – by the skin of his Texan teeth – and propelled him to re-election in 2004. Mr McCain needs to find a way to cheer Floridians up. Baseball probably won't cut it though.

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On the first day of postal voting in Florida yesterday, sport was not the first thing on most people's agendas. It was the economy. "We are really hurting down here," confirmed Richard Scher, a political science professor at the University of Florida. "I've lived here a long time, 30 years, and I've never seen this state so anxious, so apprehensive, and it's all economically based."

The battle for Florida is being waged from the Republican-leaning panhandle in the north-west to the Cuban cafes and bingo halls of Miami in the south. But nowhere will it be fought more intensively in these last two weeks than along a ribbon of federal highway called the I-4, which bisects the state, running in a straight line from here in Tampa to Daytona Beach in the east with Orlando bang in the middle.

It is why Mr McCain spent last Friday and Saturday in the Sunshine State and why Sarah Palin was skittering across Florida for several days before him. The day after tomorrow he returns, to ride a bus tour through Orlando and Tampa, the two biggest media markets in the state, and other cities in the I-4 corridor, where no less than 40 per cent of Florida's voting population resides. If the eight-lane strip of asphalt that is the I-4 is the road to capturing Florida, then it may also be the road that connects the winning candidate to Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr McCain knows it, but so too do the Democrats, who yesterday sought to outdo him by deploying not only Barack Obama to woo constituents but also Hillary Clinton.

The skies freshened by an unusual early morning chill, Mr Obama began his day with a rally before tens of thousands at a baseball field – Legends, not Tropicana – to stir the troops in Tampa. But it was his Orlando event alongside Mrs Clinton that was to spark the loudest headlines. Until last night, he and the former first lady had not campaigned side by side since appearing together, somewhat awkwardly, in Unity, New Hampshire, just after he won the nomination race.

Introducing Mr Obama to tens of thousands of supporters in the rally in Orlando, Senator Clinton asked them "to work as hard for Barack as you worked for me". She added: "We have a new slogan as we move toward victory. Its jobs, baby, jobs."

The mood on Obama One as he jetted into Florida was upbeat, with polls here – and nationally – still trending in his favour. The Democrat also arrived in the state, which has no fewer than 20 military bases, buoyed by the endorsement on Sunday of the former secretary of state, General Colin Powell.

For Mr McCain, there was more bad news in the latest Washington Post/ ABC News poll. A full 52 per cent of voters said the selection of Mrs Palin as his running-mate made them worry about his judgement. Nearly two-thirds said, meanwhile, that they considered any past association between Mr Obama and the former domestic terrorist William Ayers to be a non-issue.

Mr Obama continued, however, to warn his supporters against complacency. The polls may look wide apart now, but it won't last, he warned. "We think the race will tighten, because that's just what happens," he told NBC.

If the economy is the only issue that matters, then Mr Obama is the one who benefits. "The perception is that Mr Obama has spoken more directly to these concerns than Mr McCain has at this point," said Professor Scher, who also underscored the significance of the I-4 artery. "Someone suggested to me that the whole thing might come down to a couple of square blocks in Tampa," he told The Miami Herald. "That's not out of the question."

While the rust-belt states of the Mid-west have been struggling with shrinking economies for more than a decade, the shock has come to Florida only recently – and far more savagely. The state is first – or worst – in job-loss statistics in the nation.

Nowhere has the property market deflated more quickly. The gloom is also depressing tourism, including Orlando, the hub of America's theme parks. If Mr Obama has an edge in Florida, it is tenuous and within the margin of error. The average of state-wide polls showed the Democrat ahead in the state by a flimsy 3.2 percentage points. But it comes after a period of many months when Mr McCain held a respectable lead in Florida and the Republicans felt reasonably assured they had it locked up.

Now Mr McCain might lose it. It is a state of affairs that has left many Republicans in Florida angry at a campaign they believe has been both complacent and utterly outmanoeuvred by the Democrats, who have spent heavily on a "get out the vote" campaign, especially along the I-4, where most independent voters are concentrated.

Tellingly, official state data released on Sunday night showed that since the start of this year, the Democrats have outdone the Republicans in persuading Floridians to register to vote next month by a staggering ratio of two to one. That is a lot of new voters already inclined to vote Democrat. "The numbers tell me that the Obama campaign has done what it said it would – involve more people in the electoral process. That's good," said Allan Katz, a member of the Democratic National Committee, from Tallahassee. "Florida is going to go for Barack Obama."

While Mr McCain has built-in support in the north-west of the state, among most of the Cuban-Americans in Miami and among the state's evangelical Christians whose radio stations dominate the radio dial here, Mr Obama is working to tear away the independents in the state's central swath. Another key constituency will be Puerto Ricans, now the largest Hispanic community.

A close result in Florida would raise the spectre of 2000, when the Supreme Court gave the state and the nation to George Bush. The Democrats are preparing for the possibility of conflict this election day too. As many as 5,000 lawyers are on standby to monitor voting in precincts across the state.

Both candidates hope lawyers won't be needed. But with Florida in the toss-up category, betting on a big win for either man might be dodgier than backing the Rays for the World Series.

The sunshine state: Florida

*Florida, the "sunshine state", has a population of 18 million, fourth highest after California, Texas and New York state.

*First European settlement was established by Spain in St Augustine in 1565.

*It was home to the writers Ernest Hemingway, who had a house in Key West, and Jack Kerouac, who lived in Orlando, where Disneyland is.