State: Last blitz preaches need to vote

Forget swing voters and honing the message. For Jeb Bush and Bill McBride , the final hours of the race for governor are all about firing up their supporters.

A confident, upbeat Bush on Sunday completed a three-day bus tour and was joined by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. McBride hit black churches, a union hall, and South Florida condos -- and accepted help from Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Today, the candidates wrap up their campaigns by winging across Florida for quick rallies before local television cameras.

Meanwhile, both sides are cranking up phone banks, mobilizing vans to take voters to the polls and gathering lawn chairs to ease the wait in expected long lines Tuesday. If there's a repeat of the 2000 election or the September primary, hundreds of lawyers for both parties are standing by.

The Bush campaign is counting on beefed up GOP get-out-the-vote efforts to hold its lead. Bush's main worry is complacency, and hundreds of thousands of recorded calls are hitting Florida homes, with messages from celebrities ranging from Jack Nicklaus (to identified golfers) to Giuliani.

Bush is campaigning against both McBride and a constitutional amendment that would require smaller class sizes.

"So as you go to the polls Tuesday, and as you talk to fellow voters over the next two days, please remind them to support the Bush-Brogan ticket, but also remind them to say no to new taxes, and vote NO on Amendment 9," Bush said in an e-mail Sunday night to supporters.

McBride, who supports the amendment, is banking on a huge Democratic turnout to push him past Bush. He repeated his promise to focus more on schools and inclusion.

"It's an issue of selfishness versus being unselfish," McBride said. "The current governor says everything is absolutely fine. Go out to vote. We cannot lose hope."

An upbeat Jeb Bush

Exuding confidence, Bush wrapped up a three-day bus tour Sunday night with a rally at a Broward rodeo arena that featured more than 2,000 supporters and Giuliani.

"We have to re-elect proven leaders," Giuliani said, "and you have one of the best in your governor."

The man known as "America's Mayor" sounded more than a little concerned about the possibility of election problems. "We don't want a close election," Giuliani said. "We can't take it."

Bush's "Four More Tour," in a rented black bus with marble flooring and mirrored ceilings, sped from Pensacola to Daytona Beach to Tampa to Broward in less than 72 hours. Along the way, the governor energized voters who regularly vote Republican in the Panhandle, across the I-4 corridor and in Southwest Florida. He collected celebrity backers the way tourists collect toll receipts, from his brother the president to U.S. Housing Secretary Mel Martinez to former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack.

With Bush ahead in the final opinion polls, the tour had a celebratory air.

At Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, more than 1,000 worshipers gave Bush a standing ovation when he announced that he had "accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior." They cheered again when he referred to his opposition to abortion rights: "I believe in the sanctity of life for the unborn."

A relaxed Bush spent more than an hour on his tour bus fielding questions from reporters on policy and personal topics, ranging from abortion to the death penalty to his daughter Noelle's drug dependency problems.

"I used to feel incredibly guilty," Bush said of the price that politics extracts from family life. "I've learned to realize that, first of all, these things happen to everybody or to a lot of people. It happens to stay-at-home dads, stay-at-home moms. The guilt wasn't helping Noelle, and it wasn't helping me. But there were times I felt enormously guilty."

The governor repeatedly reminded supporters of the arrival in the state of two liberal black leaders, the Revs. Al Sharpton and the Jesse Jackson.

"We need to be sure our people are mobilized and active," Bush told reporters. "Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are partisan Democrats. They are doing what they can. They have every right to do it . . . just as we have every right to mobilize ours."

If he wins re-election Tuesday, Bush said, "we will reach out" to the disaffected Floridians, especially African-Americans, who did not support him.

In the Republican stronghold of Southwest Florida, Bush's warning that McBride would raise taxes found a receptive audience. Support is particularly strong there for the entire Bush family, including the president and the former president.

"The gene pool runs strong," said U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, who introduced Bush at a Naples retirement center.

Florida Republicans have been voting for a Bush family member in every even-numbered year since 1988 with only two exceptions, 1990 and '96. The governor told his Sarasota supporters: "It seems like every two years, there's a Bush running for something."

Today, Bush will hopscotch the state by air and end with a rally in Coconut Grove. He will vote Tuesday in Miami and await the returns there.

Bill McBride back to basics

After months of steering away from national politics and the 2000 election, McBride switched gears. He enlisted familiar faces Sunday and rallied the Democratic base, including African-Americans in Palm Beach County, condo leaders in Broward County and union members in Orlando.

Clinton headlined an outdoor church service in West Palm Beach. McBride will appear today with Gore.

Campaigning for McBride in Central Florida Sunday, Gore urged black voters "to walk through fire" to cast their ballots.

"If anybody ever tells you that one vote doesn't make a difference, ask them to come talk to me," said Gore, who lost the presidential election to George W. Bush because of the contested election in Florida.

During a church service at a civil rights memorial in West Palm Beach, Clinton told more than 1,000 worshipers that McBride and the Democrats understand diversity and the importance of helping others.

Backed by a choir in gold and purple robes, a bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. at his back, Clinton spoke with a preacher's passion.

Choosing McBride over Bush, he said, is "the difference between those who favor community and those who favor division, those who want to cooperate and those who want to dominate, those who want to count everybody in and those who are perfectly happy to keep everybody out."

James Harris, McBride's minority outreach coordinator, said McBride's message of improving schools has reached voters.

"Now," he said, "let's talk about the people who are disenfranchised in Florida. The haves and have-nots. Not the business owners, not the corporations, but the Florida worker who's working two jobs to make ends meet."

Today, McBride will attend a morning rally with Gore in Miami before barnstorming the state. Singer Jimmy Buffett, a major Democratic fundraiser, will travel with him and play along the way, including a noon show in Tampa at the courthouse square, 419 Pierce St.

Democrats say McBride's hopes are pinned to voter turnout and avoiding the voting problems that plagued the state in 2000 and that were repeated in South Florida in the September primary. They fear a lengthy ballot and new voting machines will prompt many voters to give up. Party activists plan to take snacks, bottled water and chairs to polls in South Florida to ease the wait.

Both Republicans and Democrats have lined up hundreds of lawyers to dispatch to polling places, elections offices and party headquarters across Florida, so they can promptly file complaints if qualified voters are turned away.

In Orlando Sunday afternoon, McBride stopped by the painters union hall to fire up volunteers making phone calls to registered voters. He worked the phones himself, making eight calls. He got one wrong number, two answering machines, three voters who said they already had voted for him, and two who said they planned to.

"Five out of eight," McBride then joked on his final conference call with the campaign's county coordinators around the state. "It's probably the best poll I'm going to get right now."

-- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk