Rick and Pam Chapman march with purpose and enthusiasm through a three-car-garage section of Lee’s Summit.

The well-trimmed yards are dotted with signs — some for Barack Obama, more for John McCain.

Residents jog by under a cloudless sky. A dog — large, but friendly — nuzzles the two as they approach a front door.

“I think people appreciate knowing their vote matters,” Pam said cheerfully.

Pretty pleasant for someone in the so-called political trenches in a battleground state.

With the vote just hours away, Rick and Pam are part of the GOP ground effort — the yard-by-yard, door-to-door effort to get the faithful out to vote Tuesday.

Make no mistake: The final surge for the presidency is not just the chatter on your TV now or the rumble from a big rally somewhere else in Missouri.

They may be outspent and outnumbered, but the Chapmans won’t be out-hustled in their zeal to elect McCain.

•••

On the Democratic front, they’re more than ready.

More than 100 Obama supporters have cut through Saturday’s thick fog to await last-minute instructions at campaign headquarters in midtown Kansas City.

Some have coffee and donuts before starting phone calls or marching through neighborhoods, looking for votes.

“This is kind of our rehearsal for Tuesday,” said volunteer Jackie Gafford. “Everybody knows what they need to do.”

“I might not have done this in Kansas, with all their early voting,” said volunteer Caroline McKnight, who will be making phone calls for Obama. “But they’re really excited in Missouri to get out on Election Day.”

•••

Presidential politics is big and expensive — all campaigns for the nation’s top job will have spent well over $2 billion by Wednesday, buying commercials, polling, hiring Web techies, holding big signs and bigger rallies.

The McCain campaign does not have as much money as Obama — his direct spending is capped around $84 million — so he’s had to made difficult choices.

Among the toughest: Taking cash away from this weekend’s get-out-the-vote effort and putting it into more TV commercials in the states crucial to his chances.

“The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground,” a top Republican strategist told The Washington Post. “The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel.”

The Republican National Committee has helped, providing cash for a multimillion-dollar phone-call program.

But Missouri has just 30 paid McCain staff members.

Obama? Five times that many are drawing a paycheck.

“I don’t think voters in Missouri are going to cast their ballots on the basis of who put more paid staff and offices in a state,” said Gentry Collins, who is directing the McCain campaign’s Missouri effort from Des Moines, Iowa. “Our focus has been — because it’s had to be — on recruiting volunteers.”

McCain’s volunteers, Rick and Pam among them, have contacted more than a million Missouri voters in the past two months, Collins said, more than Bush-Cheney four years ago.

“We know how important this is,” Rick said between stops. “Once you get out, it’s invigorating.”

•••

Obama has the biggest political ground effort in Missouri’s history.

“These are all folks now, no matter what happens November 4, who are really engaged in their communities,” said Buffy Wicks, Obama state director.

Penny Hershman is one of Obama’s 250 neighborhood leaders in Jackson County. There are 2,500 of them in the state, workers who have been trained in political outreach — after promising to work a minimum of 20 hours each week for the Democrat.

Hershman stopped last week at the south Kansas City home of Mark Bureman, who quickly told her she would not have to work too hard. Bureman was firmly onboard with Obama.

“This is going to be an easy house for you,” he said.

Hershman asked whether Bureman and his wife, Linda, could volunteer to make phone calls at Obama headquarters over the weekend. Check and check. Both signed up for shifts.

Being from the area helps, Hershman said. “You say, ‘I’m Penny, and I’m from the neighborhood.’ I think they respond to you a little better.”

•••

The two top candidates are reaching out to supporters this weekend: “It’s going to get nasty, I’m sure, in the next four days,” Obama told a crowd Thursday in Columbia. He was in Springfield on Saturday night.

McCain: Obama is “measuring the drapes” for the White House, while the GOP has “momentum.”

Rallies aside, the Chapmans and Hershman may be the most important weapon each candidate now has left: a handshake, a door hanger, a phone call or a chat in the church parking lot.

Obama’s brain trust is fearful of the GOP’s well-known 72-hour get-out-the-vote effort at campaign’s end, so they’ve ramped up in Missouri, now the closest fight in the nation, according to late polls.

“We’ve been working on this for six months,” said Wicks. “It’s been obviously a big priority for our campaign.”

The campaign has established a sophisticated, computer-based outreach program — all data wind up getting poured into a big database in Chicago — that climaxes this weekend.

Campaign staff leadership has been divided into 400 similar teams. A team supervisor works with coordinators of canvassing, data processing, volunteer recruitment and phone banks. The teams are in charge of a particular area and keep meticulous notes about each contact made, either in person or over the phone.

E-mail addresses are as precious as gold — because they bring in the gold.

“I know this campaign has asked a lot of you,” Michelle Obama said by e-mail to millions of supporters late last week. “But in the next five days, Barack will need you more than ever before. …That’s why I’m asking you to dig deep and make one final donation to help get us across the finish line.”

This after the campaign has raised a record-shredding $600 million, with more on the way (although yard signs, once $5 each at Obama’s headquarters, were marked down Saturday to just $1.)

The GOP will rely heavily on telephones this weekend. Half a dozen volunteers at the Republican Party offices in Independence dialed voters across the county late last week; more are on the job today.

•••

The ghost of George Bush’s 2004 get-out-the-vote effort haunts Democrats. Exit polls had John Kerry beating George Bush but failed to see the massive Republican turnout.

So they hope to overwhelm the GOP with money and staggering numbers — 25,000 volunteers knocking on 1.3 million Missouri doors this weekend, half a million phone calls.

Read more, and a photo gallery on this piece by Dave Helling and Steve Kraske