After the storm, the crowds. At the last rally of his presidential campaign – more than 600 days after he announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois – Barack Obama gathered around 100,000 supporters to Manassas, Virginia.

He was uncharacteristically late – more than an hour, in fact – after bad weather in North Carolina delayed his departure. On board that delayed flight, the press corps was buzzing with wire photos of the candidate crying through his comments about his grandmother. From the press area, Obama’s tears were not visible. Seen from the press buffer close to the stage where the photographers work, his public emotion was as striking as it was rare.

So he began his last rally – in the DC suburbs that one of McCain’s advisers described as lying outside the “real Virginia” – with a profound thanks to his crowds. All the tens of thousands who have waited for him for hours in so many battleground states in the general election, stretching back to the primary states at the start of this long contest. 

They had enriched him, he said, and lifted him up when he was feeling down. Now it was time to vote, and to work to turn out the vote, no matter what the weather tomorrow. No matter how hard it rains. 

So what better note to end his final rally than the classic South Carolina tale of the state representative who taught him how to be Fired Up and Ready to Go? His Virginia audience barely needed the chant and call. But the candidate thrived on it, at a late hour of a long campaign, when he sorely needed some firing up.

It was raining before Barack Obama walked on stage in Charlotte, North Carolina. The crowd in the field behind the University of North Carolina was still moving in, snaking through the security barriers round the car park and beyond. A slight rain rapidly turned into a drenching, heavy downpour.

On this, the third rain-soaked event of Obama’s final week of the election, there was the saddest of news: his 86-year-old grandmother passed away after losing her struggle with cancer.

Madelyn Dunham was more than just Obama’s grandmother. She was a surrogate mother for many years, while he lived in Hawaii and his mother remained in Indonesia. She was above all a strong figure who held the family together, with a pioneering career as a female executive in a Hawaii bank and a steady emotional presence in a deeply unconventional family.

She was also the last parental figure in Obama’s life, since his own mother and grandfather passed away several years ago. In a joint statement with his half-sister Maya, Obama described her this way: “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment,strength and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and lef tthis world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.”

John McCain just arrived in Indianapolis, otherwise known as stop No. 4 on his seven state, 22-hour campaign extravaganza leading into Election Day. So far, there hasn’t been much big news today. McCain is delivering pretty much the same stump speech he’s been giving for the past week or so, hitting Obama as the “redistributor in chief” and talking up his own cred as someone who would enter the job with decades of experience, especially on foreign policy. What’s interesting are the little things. For one, McCain, like many candidates in the final heat of a campaign, is losing his voice a little bit. That’s bad news for the folks for the several hundred people who met him at an airport rally here. Not only are the acoustics pretty bad, but the McCain gathering seems to be positioned directly under the flight path for incoming planes here. So far, four massive jetliners have flown directly over McCain’s head as he has been speaking, making it almost impossible for folks on the ground to hear. That may not be the best news for McCain, who is struggling to keep Indiana from going blue. Polls here show McCain virtually tied with Obama heading into Tuesday. Even so, McCain hasn't spent much time here. Today's visit was only the third time McCain has been in the state since the spring.

It’s been a long final swing of the presidential campaign,and everyone – from the candidate down – is exhausted. In Barack Obama’s forward cabin on his plane, the lights are frequently turned off during afternoon and evening flights, to allow him to sleep.

But even on the morning of the last full day of the election, the fatigue creeps in.

In Jacksonville, Florida, Obama started his final stop to this critical state – the one battleground that troubles Obama’s senior aides more than any other – with yet another arena rally.

Although the arena was only two-thirds full, the crowd was boisterous. When one group of supporters shouted to him about having voted early, Obama said, “Thank you for your vote!” The cluster of fans went wild.“All right y’all,” he said. “Settle down.”

Maybe Obama was too calm for his own good. “After 21 months and three debates, John McCain still has still not been able to tell you, the American people, a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” he began on a familiar riff.

“The Republicans are spending a lot of money on ads here in Ohio. But if you watch those ads, you don’t know…”

At which point, the crowd in Florida started booing loudly enough to stop him mid-flow.

“Florida,” he corrected himself. “I’ve been traveling too much. They’ve been spending a lot of money in Ohio too!”

And just to prove that he knew where he was – that this wasn’t a Bob Dole moment – Obama threw in a quick reference to the city too.“And let me tell you Jacksonville, you have to ask yourself is there one different thing that you’ve heard in these ads, that would tell you what he’d do for the economy in the future?”

Obama’s aides must be relieved their candidate is only campaigning in three states today – not McCain’s seven – before returning home to Chicago.

It’s hard to believe, but the end is in sight. With Election Day less than 24 hours away, John McCain will hit nine cities and seven battleground states today in a grueling schedule that will have the candidate and his entourage on the road for the next 22 hours. After a midnight rally in Miami, last night, McCain this morning flies to Tampa and then is scheduled to continue on to rallies in Bristol, Tenn., near the Virginia border; Pittsburgh; Indianapolis; Roswell, N.M.; Las Vegas; and will end up in Prescott, Ariz., where he will hold a midnight rally on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse, the place one of his political heroes, Barry Goldwater, began and ended his own presidential campaign. From there, McCain will head home to Phoenix, where he is set to arrive around 4 a.m. EST. Yet McCain won’t get to sleep in. Ignoring his usual Election Day rituals of seeing a movie and awaiting the results, the candidate will likely be back on the road early Tuesday, when, after voting, he is tentatively scheduled to hold last-minute rallies in Colorado and New Mexico. He’s tentatively scheduled to be back in Phoenix around 7 p.m. EST—around the time polls begin closing in Indiana and Virginia, two GOP strongholds that threaten to turn blue this election. It’s unusual to see a presidential candidate actually campaigning on Election Day, but McCain’s advisers continue to insist the race is tightening even more than what public polls suggest. Speaking to reporters on the plane last night, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, repeated a line he and other aides have been using in recent days. "We are in striking distance," he declared.