With just five days of campaigning left, both major parties’ tickets have been pouring time, resources and money into the battleground state of Missouri, in hopes of sealing up its 11 electoral votes on Tuesday.

Both members of the Democratic ticket and the GOP vice presidential nominee scheduled appearances Thursday in the Show-Me State.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin drew an overflow crowd to an early-morning rally at Southeast Missouri State University in the conservative southeast corner of the state, telling voters how she and running mate John McCain would fix the American economy, lead the nation toward energy independence and ensure victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Palin told the crowd of more than 13,000 that “Country First” is more than their campaign slogan. “That’s going to be printed on every page in the employee handbook” if he’s elected, she said, according to the Associated Press.

“I think she’s the best thing that’s happened to this campaign,” 20-year Navy veteran Bill Costello, 50, of nearby Jackson, Mo., said. “Me and my particular clique — we aren’t voting for John McCain, we’re voting for Sarah.”

Meanwhile, her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joe Biden, spoke to more than 500 people at a high school in the St. Louis suburb of Arnold, in a county his running mate, Barack Obama, lost to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

Flanked by dozens of laid-off autoworkers, Biden outlined ways that he and Obama would help the middle class. “At the end of the day, it’s ultimately about jobs,” Biden said, according to another AP account.

Later Thursday, Obama is scheduled to speak on the campus of the University of Missouri in Columbia, a liberal stronghold full of young voters in the middle of the state.

Missouri has been a hotly contested state in all of the recent presidential elections, and it has usually gone with the winner — twice for both Bill Clinton and President Bush.

A recent poll conducted for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV showed the presidential candidates roughly even among likely voters.

A RealClearPolitics.com average of polls shows Obama maintaining an ever-so-slight advantage that is well within the margin of error in almost all polling.

How split is Missouri? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found a house divided between father and son in suburban Kansas City — but not the way you might expect.

“So with a father and son defying the expected script of how people will vote — the young for Barack Obama, the old for McCain — the argument continues in a battleground county within a state that has voted for the winning presidential candidate every time since 1900 (except 1956).”

John Petrocik, chair of the political science department at the University of Missouri, said Missouri could witness a sweep this year for Democratic statewide candidates, including Obama.

“Obama is all over the air,” he said of the campaign ads running there. “Much, much more air time than John McCain. For the most part, he has run ads that have tied John McCain to President Bush. It sounds like you’re dealing with John Bush-McCain.”

Missouri, he says, garners so much attention during national elections because it is seen as a political microcosm of the country, with its older city of St. Louis, its relatively newer metropolis of Kansas City, a culturally conservative belt, declining rural areas, a large minority population, a growing Hispanic population and many universities, among other things.

This year, the political focus in Missouri has been more on bread and butter issues, he said. “I think the election — given the environment — shows a decline in the impact of cultural issues that played larger roles in the last two cycles in Missouri,” Petrocik said.

Regarding Thursday’s Obama rally in Columbia, Petrocik said it gives the Illinois senator a chance to campaign for himself, as well as several local Democrats, including congressional candidate Judy Baker.

By speaking in central Missouri, he’s also able to campaign, by proxy, via media coverage of the event in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Petrocik takes issue with how much attention is paid to voter turnout leading up to the election when the real thing that shifts political power is voters’ defections from their self-identified party. This looks to be a good year for Democrats to pick up votes of disaffected self-identified Republicans, he said.

In terms of attention and money, the Washington Post shows that Obama has out-campaigned, outspent and outraised McCain in Missouri since the start of 2007.

The state is bracing for a massive turnout, with Secretary of State Robin Carnahan predicting a turnout of 76 percent turnout of the state’s 4,205,774 registered voters.

Of the 340,000 first-time registrants, nearly 150,000 are 18 to 24 years old — more than double any other age group. In the heavily Democratic urban areas of Kansas City and St. Louis City, 40 percent of the new voters are in that age range.

Obama is specifically targeting that young demographic in his Thursday appearance at Mizzou. His early supporter, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, prodded those same young voters last week in Columbia.

“The common conventional wisdom is that the students won’t show up,” McCaskill said, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. “I know I sound like a mother, but shame on you if you don’t make Barack Obama president.”

But a big turnout could also lead to big problems for Missouri’s voters and vote-counters next week. Electionline.org, a nonpartisan research foundation, put the Show-Me State on a list of about 12 states to watch for widespread voting trouble.

“Like the other states, Missouri has several possibly troublesome factors, including new voter identification laws, a heated race for a statewide office, a ballot packed with candidates and initiatives, and a highly charged, partisan atmosphere. Missouri has the added complication of being a swing state in the presidential race, with the candidates virtually tied,” the Boston Globe reported. “Those factors, coupled with an unprecedented number of new voters and an expected record turnout, has led some political analysts to predict that Missouri could be at the center of ‘a perfect storm’ that could throw the 2008 presidential election into disarray.”