Rival campaign advisers talk battlegrounds in the final push

Top campaign aides to President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney spoke Sunday about the most important battleground states, saying their respective candidates will do quite well in states they must win.

Obama campaign Senior Adviser David Axelrod and Romney campaign Political Director Rich Beeson both appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and talked about states like Ohio, Virginia and Florida.

"We feel very competitive in the state of Florida. There have been a spate of polls. In fact, in all of these polls, battleground states that have come out in the last 48 hours, we, I think we've been ahead in 90% of them, including Florida," Axelrod said.

"When you talk about Florida," Beeson countered, "for them to go down and spend more money there is a little bit like Barack Obama's government right now - that they just want to throw money at the problem and hope it fixes it. But at the end of the day, Gov. Romney is going to carry Florida by a significant margin."

Polls have indicated a tight race, with an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll that released Saturday showing Obama with 49% of likely voters and Romney at 47%--a margin well within the sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. A Mason-Dixon poll released Friday indicated 51% for Romney and 45% for Obama. That's also within the poll's sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Beeson also touched on Pennsylvania, a state where polls show Obama with a lead. The Romney campaign now says the state is in play, but Obama's team says such talk is just an act of desperation.

"Four years ago this weekend President Obama was campaigning in Indiana," Beeson said. "Today, Gov. Romney is campaigning in Pennsylvania. I don't think campaigning in states where we haven't won since 1988, 1984 and 1972 are exactly acts of desperation. The map is starting to expand drastically in our favor."

Besides breaking the race down by specific states, Beeson said Obama's overall poll numbers show the president is in trouble.

"You've got an incumbent president who has been running for this job for the last four years, since the day he got elected, will have raised and spent over $1 billion, and he is stuck well below 50 (percent), at 48, 47, 46 in all of these polls. When you're an incumbent under 50 (percent) and well under 50, that's a bad place to be," Beeson said