The candidates, each of whom is plane-hopping to four states a day in these final days, seem exhausted. Romney, generally an early-to-bed type, landed in New Hampshire at 1 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning, a slumbering grandson draped over his shoulder; by 8:50 a.m., he was back on his feet, headed for the day's first campaign rally. Obama began his day at FEMA headquarters in Washington at 8 a.m. Saturday, was in Cleveland by 11:30, and would see Wisconsin, Iowa, and Virginia before the day was over past midnight.

Naturally, no one is sicker of it than the press. "I have talked to so many Ohio voters," one longtime member of the Romney press corps groaned as we met at Romney's rally here, which drew about 2,500 to a cavernous sheet-metal warehouse. "I just want to go home," another said through chattering teeth at Romney's Friday night mega-rally outside Cincinnati. On the Romney bus the next day, a grateful press corps found vials of 5-Hour Energy waiting on their seats.

But it is the residents of the Buckeye State, America's swing state on steroids, who bear the brunt of election overload. "You've already been here twice!" a man told 28-year-old Teamsters member Jennifer Knapmeyer when she came to his door looking for his housemates Saturday afternoon. "You know they're going to vote!" But they hadn't voted yet, Knapmeyer sighed as she walked away, so they could count on one or two more visits a day through Tuesday.

"We are sure going to miss the 9,000 TV ads every day," Shannon Burns, a Cleveland-based Republican consultant, said sarcastically. (About $150 million has been spent on television in the presidential race in Ohio.) Ohioans never have to travel to see presidential candidates these days, he noted: "If you just stay in one place in this state, they'll be there sooner or later."

Indeed, in the last days of the campaign, Ohio would see Romney Friday (twice), Sunday and Monday, while the president toured three different Ohio cities Friday and would set foot in a different part of the state each of the last three days of the campaign. On Sunday, the two nominees and their running mates were all scheduled to be campaigning in different parts of Ohio. On Monday, Obama was scheduled to bring along Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen.

The Ohioans, ready as they are for this to be over, are nonetheless troupers about the whole deal. They keep coming out to see the candidates, even after they've done their duty and voted. They are good listeners and cheerful partisans. The candidates are always careful to include shout-outs to the importance of the state -- "Your state is the one I'm counting on, by the way," Romney said, "it's the one I need to win!" -- and these lines, often the only quotations that make it into the report on the local news or in the local paper, flatter Ohioans' pride.