PRESIDENT BUSH completes a final swing today through what was once the solid Republican heartland of America, in stark recognition of how vulnerable his party has become as it fights to hold on to majorities in Congress in tomorrow’s crucial mid-term elections.

Mr Bush was in defiant mood yesterday as he prepared to face what could be a stinging voter backlash over the war in Iraq. At a campaign stop in Nebraska, he turned the spotlight on Democrats who hope to take control of the US Congress on Tuesday.

Acknowledging the unpopularity of the war, he said that the Democrats offered only criticism. “Anger is not a plan. Criticism is not a plan. Pessimism is not a plan,” the President told cheering crowds.

But his itinerary in the final 48 hours of the campaign for control of Congress underscores the scale of the hole he finds himself in. Instead of battling for undecided voters in the crucial states of the Northeast and Mid West, where most close American elections are played out, Mr Bush was on the defensive, trying to boost support for beleaguered Republican members of Congress in heavily conservative parts of the country.

Yesterday, in addition to Nebraska, Mr Bush travelled to Kansas, another rural state in the Great Plains where Republicans have long dominated politics but where incumbent Congressmen find themselves in unusual difficulty. Today he will try to reinforce the party’s suport base in the conservative-dominated south, campaigning in northern Florida, Arkansas, and ending with a rally in his home state of Texas.

Opinion polls at the weekend suggested a slight tightening of the race in the final few days. A Washington Post poll yesterday gave Democrats a six-point lead over Republicans among likely voters tomorrow, down from double-digit leads in the past few weeks.

But Republican officials were acknowledging privately that they would lose seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The party’s political strategists are already writing off at least 10 seats in the House of Representatives, where Democrats need to capture 15 of all 435 House seats up for election.

That will require President Bush’s party to sweep almost all of the 30 or so of its seats in the House that are seen as competitive, a tall order in the current environment.

In the Senate, where 33 of the 100 seats are being contested, Republican prospects of holding on still look stronger.

Democrats need to gain six seats to take control and seem more or less guaranteed to win at least two — Pennsylvania and Ohio.

But four more Republican seats are on a knife edge — Rhode Island, Virginia, Montana and Missouri. And Republicans are even hopeful that they may be able to capture one Democratic Senate seat, Maryland, where polls suggest the race is narrowing.

However, there was more bad news for Republicans at the weekend when the Army Times, an independent newspaper for the nation’s Armed Forces, called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.

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