Missouri treats presidential politics like one of Marty Schottenheimer’s old Chiefs teams. Play good defense, keep it close and hope someone makes a play at the end.

David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, said last week that Missouri’s 11 electoral votes, and its history as a bellwether state, remain a possibility for the Democratic candidate.

Just a couple of weeks before, GOP voices in the state, enjoying the afterglow of the Republican National Convention and the new energy supplied by nominee John McCain’s vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, thought Obama forces might actually abandon Missouri to shift resources to more winnable locales.

Now, Missouri resides in “margin-of-error” territory, that zone where polling methodology becomes a fuzzy exercise. In short, it’s close, and apparently state residents like it that way.

Never mind those polls that show Mr. Obama slipping ahead in national approval numbers. They demonstrate a mood without doing much with the math. The real fight goes on state-to-state, where Electoral College votes get cast. It takes 270 of those votes to win the presidency. Both campaigns have calculators at the ready.

When the McCain campaign conceded Michigan last week, that smarted in numerical and psychological terms. Foremost, it represents 17 electoral votes, a nice prize in victory calculations. But Michigan was targeted early as a blue-to-red possibility, one of those states Democrat John Kerry carried in 2004 but that Republicans thought they could swing this time around.

In Missouri, a CNN/Time poll last week showed Mr. Obama up by a percentage point over his Republican opponent. The week before, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch/KMOV poll showed Mr. McCain ahead by a percentage point.

On the CNN electoral map, Mr. Obama has 250 votes while Mr. McCain shows 189. Among the 99 electoral votes in the toss-up category are Missouri’s 11.

The Real Clear Politics Web site has an electoral map that shows Mr. Obama with 264 votes and Mr. McCain trailing with 163. In this case, there are 111 toss-up votes, with Missouri also in that mix.

Among the battleground states, Ohio, Florida, Virginia and even Colorado seem to be getting more national attention than Missouri at the moment. But that could change as days dwindle before the election.

This state, which has backed the winning presidential candidate in every election but one in the last century, has close races. Maybe Missourians just like to stay up late on election night.