Could Sandy cost Obama key election states?

Less than a week before the US presidential elections, political pundits are eyeing two key states, Pennsylvania and Virginia, struggling to recover in the wake of the monster storm. Read (Sandy muffles US campaign a week from election day)

Superstorm Sandy's effect on election day in those states next Tuesday is just speculation at this stage, but both are vital to President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney's White House ambitions.

Pennsylvania, solidly Democratic for the past two decades, appears to suddenly have come into play -- even though Obama is leading his Republican rival by 49.5 percent to 44.8 percent in an average of polls there by the RealClearPolitics website.

But the president's support is drawn heavily from metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and less from more conservative rural areas. Havoc on city streets, if widespread outages continue, might depress turnout and could see Romney gain an edge.

Pennsylvania's 20 electoral college votes could prove crucial in the "every vote counts" tight race to the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory.

Scenting a shift in the air, two Republican super PACs were set to spend some $3.2 million flooding the Keystone State with television ads in a last minute all-out push, the Philadelphia Inquirer said.

Romney's political director, Rich Beeson, said in a Tuesday memo that "this expansion of the electoral map demonstrates that Governor Romney's momentum has jumped containment from the usual target states and has spread to deeper blue states."

"We will put more resources into the target states in the final week than previous GOP campaigns have been able to do in the final 10 weeks," he vowed.

The Obama campaign reportedly countered the Republican blitz with its own television ads, which began broadcasting across the state on Tuesday.

And it mocked Romney's decision to air new ads in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan as a sign of "weakness," saying the former Massachusetts governor had concluded he had no path to victory through swing states.

"The president is leading or tied in every battleground state across the country, and he leads early voting in every state across the country," said Obama campaign chief Jim Messina.

Pennsylvania analyst G. Terry Madonna told McClatchy newspapers that Romney's chances of scoring an upset in the state remained low.

"He's still not doing well enough in the Philly and Pittsburgh suburbs. It's close enough that you can't say 'never.' But four points with little more than a week out is hard to make up."

A similar concern for the Obama campaign is that low voter turnout in Virginia -- which went Democratic for the first time since 1964 to back Obama in 2008 -- could potentially swing the state back to the Republicans, handing over its 13 electoral votes.

According to the RealClearPolitics average, the two men are running neck-and-neck at 47.8 percent of the vote in the state, which was also hit hard by the storm with widespread power cuts and blizzards.

Trying to seize the moment, Romney was due to be back campaigning in Virginia on Thursday.

As Sandy barreled down on the US East Coast late Monday, the two candidates called an unprecedented campaign pause to focus on preparations for the mega-storm which killed at least 43 people in the United States and Canada.

It also left millions without power across the eastern seaboard -- just days before an election that, under US law, relies heavily on electronic voting procedures.

Justin Riemer, deputy secretary for the Virginia State Board of Elections, told AFP in an email Tuesday that so far only one polling station, in Tazewell County, Virginia, had asked to be relocated.

He was unsure how many polling places were without power. "However, we believe all will have power restored in time for the election," he wrote.

He also estimated that only about 5 percent of eligible voters had registered to vote early via absentee ballots so far.

"Storm-diminished turnouts... could cost Obama tens of thousands of popular votes. It could also cost him 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania," said journalist Major Garret writing in the National Journal.

"The implications are obvious in Virginia as well, but that state was always going to be close, and the margin of victory understood to be narrow. There are ways Obama can win without Virginia but not many without Pennsylvania."