Florida's 27 electoral votes too close to call

<p>TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The presidential race in Florida, the largest battleground state and a must win for John McCain, was too close to call Tuesday after final blitzes by both campaigns.</p><p>Once thought fairly safe for McCain, Democrat Barack Obama has put Florida in play by far outspending and outstaffing his Republican opponent. That, combined with the financial mess on Wall Street, has erased a lead McCain held for most of the year in the state that holds 27 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.</p><p>Most polls in the week leading up to the election showed a statistical deadheat.</p><p>The final two weeks of the election have seen each of the candidates put heavy resources into Florida, including Obama ending a 30-minute infomercial with a live shot from a Broward County rally. He and running mate Joe Biden, along with former Vice President Al Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Clinton, have all made appearances in Florida the final week.</p><p>And that's forced McCain to pay that much more attention to Florida, with final week appearances by him and Sarah Palin and a Florida-only ad featuring Gov. Charlie Crist.</p><p>Florida has only voted for one Democratic presidential candidate since backing Jimmy Carter in 1976 — Bill Clinton in 1996. Even then, Clinton only received 48 percent of the vote. President Bush carried Florida by only 537 votes in the 2000 election that took five weeks to sort out.</p><p>While Bush won by a more comfortable 381,000 votes in 2004, this year's race is expected to be much closer. Since 2004, Democrats have added 461,000 voters to their rolls, compared to 172,000 more Republicans. And the number of black voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, has increased by about 250,000 since 2004.</p><p>The campaigns are also competing for Florida's nearly 1.4 million Hispanic voters, as well as large blocks of Jewish and elderly voters.</p><p>Overall, Florida has 11.2 million voters, including more than 4.7 million Democrats and nearly 4.1 million Republicans.</p>