Q: What is the focus of each campaign for these final two weeks of the election? Are there really undecided voters left out there to be swayed or is it more important to inspire the respective bases to get out and vote? How different are the strategies of the Kerry and Bush camps?

Now that the debates are over, and there are few opportunities left for big national message moments, the focus for each of the campaigns will be the same: finding their voters and making sure they vote. Most polls, including ours at TIME Magazine, show that the number of truly undecided voters is tiny -- as few as 3% of likely voters. So that means victory is likely to go to the side that does the best job of getting their own loyalists to the polls.

The Democrats, who have long been better than the Republicans at this ground game, are pouring more resources into it than they ever have -- but so are the Republicans. Both sides have built amazing databases about millions of voters, often by sending their workers door to door with Palm Pilots to collect information about people, their lives and their interests. But they also understand that what will matter most is the most old-fashioned kind of politics there is: personal contact. And the effort goes well beyond the political parties themselves. Not only is the Kerry campaign coordinating a massive effort with the Democratic National Committee, but Democratic-leaning outside organizations are also focusing heavily on registering Democratic voters, keeping them motivated, getting them to vote early where they can and literally hauling them to the polls on election day if they have to. One of those organizations, America Coming Together, is spending a mind-blowing $125 million on such operations in the battleground states.

The Republicans, who cruised into the 2000 election expecting a comfortable victory and then got a shock on election day, also understand they can no longer neglect this aspect of the campaign. The 2002 elections -- in which, for instance, they pulled off a big surprise by unseating a Democratic governor and senator in Georgia -- showed that they, too, have figured out how to reach their voters and get them to the polls. Their big push will come in the final 72 hours of the campaign.

Q: From the poll numbers and reporting, which "blue states" do you see President having the best chance of winning and which "red states" favor Senator Kerry? What are the reasons behind the change?

This is a very, very tricky question, because the closer we get to election day, the less reliable and more confusing the polls seem to get. (As I am writing this, the Washington Post is telling me that President Bush's job approval -- that all important measure for an incumbent President-- is a healthy 54%, and the New York Times is saying he's on political life support at 44%.) In 2000, some of the polls in Ohio going into election day showed Bush winning by as many as 14 points, but thanks to an unpredicted Democratic turnout surge, he won by less than 3 points.

What does seem fairly safe to say is that the battleground map is shrinking. A few months ago, we were all talking about almost 20 states being "in play." Now, the number looks more like 10. The conventional wisdom, for what it's worth, suggests that political pros will be most closely watching three states on election night: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Win two of them, the betting is, and you win the White House. But at the moment, I wouldn't predict the outcome in any of them.

Q: Why is this year's election often called "the most important election of our lifetime?" What presidential race in the past is the closest analogy to this one?

That will be easier to answer once we know who wins, although there is much about this election that seems very unique to me. Consider how, only four years ago, Ralph Nader was getting traction with the argument that there really wasn't much difference between the two candidates. Nobody is saying that now.

If Kerry wins, comparisons will be drawn to the election of 1980, when the country was very distressed about where Jimmy Carter was taking it, and made a big bet on a candidate whom voters didn't begin feeling truly comfortable with until the debates. If it's Bush, it would seem very much like the election of 1988, where the country -- whatever its misgivings about the party in power -- picked the status quo over a Massachusetts liberal who never really connected with voters.

Q: Can you identify one or two questions that you wish had been asked of either President Bush or Senator Kerry in the debates?

I thought the moderators did a terrific job of asking the questions that needed to be asked. What I wish could have happened, though, is the kind of followup that wasn't allowed in the rules. In the last debate, for instance, President Bush claimed that he had never said he was unconcerned about Osama bin Laden; there are at least two quotes that you could have pointed to in a followup that would have shown him saying precisely that. The same is true of Vice President Cheney's assertion that he had never linked al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. I would also have liked to see some additional followup on Senator Kerry's Senate record, which constitutes most of his adult life, and is still pretty vague in the minds of most voters. To bolster his credentials as a fiscal conservative, for instance, Kerry constantly brags about having been an original sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill; that piece of legislation was in fact nothing more than a gimmick that avoided genuine choices.