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Georgia voters were expected to give the rest of the country an early clue to where Super Tuesday’s 24 presidential primaries and caucuses will drift once the results stream in from polling stations coast-to-coast.

Georgia’s polls close at 7 p.m. ET, while most other states finish voting between 8 and 10 p.m.

The candidates, meanwhile, headed to their home states to await the verdicts after a tense day of campaigning across the country.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama approached Super Tuesday with caution. Neither predicted a decisive victory once the dust settles.

“I still think that Senator Clinton is the favorite … she had a 20-30 point lead in most of these states,” Obama said in Chicago, where he and his wife Michelle voted Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve been closing some ground and my guess is we’ll have a good night and probably end up having a split decision.”

Click here for a photo essay of Super Tuesday.

The GOP contest was less civil.

The race between John McCain and Mitt Romney was approaching the boiling point as the candidates hustled to lock up support in the 21 states holding Republican primaries and caucuses.

Though McCain came into the coast-to-coast battle with a healthy lead in the polls, the feud between him and Romney was playing out like a dead heat. McCain attacked his opponent for having a “terrible record as governor” of Massachusetts, and Romney retorted that he must be in strong contention if he’s so able to get under the Arizona senator’s skin.

Accusations only mounted after former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won the West Virginia GOP convention Tuesday, with the help of delegates previously backing McCain. Romney was in the lead following the first round of voting in the state. But after no candidate took a clear majority and voting went into a second round, McCain’s delegates were told to back Huckabee, helping him take the win.

Romney Campaign Manager Beth Myers released a statement accusing McCain of cutting a “backroom deal.”

Click here to read more about the “backroom deal” accusations from FOX News embed producer.

The urgency of the GOP race could be due in part to the fact that nine of the Republican contests are winner-take-all, while the Democratic contests all award delegates proportionally. The enormous cache of delegates at stake on Super Tuesday is not enough to clinch a nomination but plenty enough to mint a runaway favorite, particularly on the Republican side.

McCain and Romney also clashed over comments Romney made about former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh telling him to ease off his criticism of McCain.

Romney told FOX News Dole is “probably the last person I would have wanted to have write a letter for me.”

McCain demanded an apology, and Romney later tried to call Dole. But Romney said he had nothing to apologize for.

Meanwhile, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson blasted McCain in a letter read on the Laura Ingraham radio show Tuesday morning.

“I cannot, and I will not vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience,” Dobson wrote the conservative talk show host. “Should John McCain capture the nomination, as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life.”

As McCain has picked up steam — winning the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida primaries — conservative figureheads have blasted him for being too moderate.

McCain has tried to combat that with a string of endorsements from all points on the right spectrum.

He rallied in Manhattan on Tuesday morning and took shots at Romney on the talk shows, accusing him of having a “terrible record as governor” and pouring millions of dollars into ads attacking him.

Romney said McCain is “so making up facts that it’s really quite extraordinary.”

He told supporters at West Virginia’s Republican nominating convention Tuesday that McCain’s support for global warming curbs “would effectively kill coal,” a lifeblood of the state. The first round of voting in the state showed Romney in the lead but failed to select a winner.

“This is not a long shot,” Romney said of his candidacy. “I am the candidate who can stop John McCain.”

Weather threatened to be a factor in some states. A wintry mess including snow and ice was forecast for New England, and snow was expected along a large corridor from southwest Kansas to northern Michigan, covering several primary states between.

The tightness of the Democratic race and the sheer scale of the voting in nearly two dozen states left Clinton and Obama wary of making predictions as they offered last-minute pitches in a round of early morning network TV interviews.

“We’re all kind of guessing about what it’s all going to mean because it’s never happened before,” Clinton said. “There’s a lot we’re going to find out about how all this works.” She said she found it all “intriguing and somewhat mystifying.”

Obama said a “split decision” was likely. “I don’t think today’s going to end up being decisive,” he said on FOX News. “But I think that our message is starting to break through. And we’re very optimistic about our prospects.”

His campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in a memo Monday that the Obama camp’s strategy is to stay close enough in the delegate count on Super Tuesday to proceed to the post-Feb. 5 states.

California has emerged as a key battleground for the Democrats, though, as Obama has recently edged ahead in the polls in the delegate-rich state. Clinton still leads in the polls for the vital New York and New Jersey primaries.

On Super Tuesday, the Iowa-New Hampshire days of retail politicking in rustic diners were a distant memory, although only weeks old. Clinton and Obama each poured more than $1 million a day into TV ads in the last week alone; Clinton bought an hour on the Hallmark Channel for a town hall meeting on Monday night, and Obama saw some $250,000 disappear in 30 seconds in his Super Bowl ad a day earlier.

Clinton voted near her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., accompanied by husband Bill and daughter Chelsea. “You’re a Democrat, right?” election worker Evan Norris joked. Clinton smiled. “I am just very excited about today,” she said. “The stakes are huge.”

In Topsfield, Mass., where a steady stream of voters filed to a polling place in a cold rain, teacher Marcia Spector, 58, said she had made the “very, very tough” decision to support Obama, reasoning he would be more able than Clinton to win the presidency in the fall.

“I just feel that he is dynamic and he is for change,” she said. “He doesn’t bring the baggage. I think he’s more electable, actually.”

It was tough, too, for Mary Jordan, 43, a teacher’s aide — so tough she said she didn’t make up her mind until she was in the polling booth. Voting Republican, she went for Romney, the state’s former governor, because of his business experience, while offering no one a glowing endorsement. “I think he’s the least unlikable,” she said. “I really didn’t like any of them.”

In Illinois, Obama supporters expressed pride for the home-state senator as they voted. “We have something great to vote for today,” said Catherine Braendel, 44, a marketing consultant who lives down the street from Obama in Chicago.

In Grayslake, Ill., registered Democrat Steve Greenberg, 39, decided his vote would be more valuable on the Republican side as he thought ahead to the general election. “I went with McCain because if the Democrats lost, I’d be more comfortable with him,” he said.

McCain struggled to close the sale with his party’s base after coming strikingly far without its solid support. He said he would extend his hand to Democrats, but “I will preserve my proud conservative Republican credentials.”

Romney sought until the end to exploit the right’s mistrust of McCain, who opposed President Bush’s tax cuts when they were introduced, departed from orthodoxy on immigration, favors mandates to slow global warming and led campaign finance reforms that activists say trampled on their freedom of speech.

McCain responded with a TV ad reminding voters that Romney had changed some stripes. It showed Romney in a 1994 debate calling himself “an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”

After months when it was all about expectations and momentum, not to mention confusion, real numbers finally became important.

The two dozen Super Tuesday contests were delivering 1,023 Republican and 1,681 Democratic delegates. The numbers needed to win the nomination: 1,191 Republican and 2,025 Democratic.

John Edwards’ departure after South Carolina’s primary simplified the math but little else on the Democratic side.

Since winning that state, Obama has collected a succession of marquee endorsements — several of them named Kennedy — and pulled into a statistical tie with Clinton in a national poll and in California, Tuesday’s biggest prize with 370 Democratic delegates.

The two were campaigning for history, as well — Clinton seeking to become the first female president, Obama the first black one.

Little separates them on most issues, including universal health coverage, ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq and raising taxes on the rich. And neither has accounted fully for all their proposed spending.

Instead, the campaign has turned on Clinton’s experience and Obama’s vision of change, debated intensely but with more civility in the latest round than when former President Clinton brought racial sensitivities to the surface in stumping for his wife in South Carolina.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, California, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, New York, Super Tuesday, Top Story, West Virginia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.