WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican John McCain declared “I’m going to win it,” dismissing polls showing him behind with little more than a week to go in the presidential race. A confident Democrat Barack Obama drew a jaw-dropping 100,000 people to a single rally and rolled out a new TV ad asserting his rival is “running out of time.”

Heading into the final nine days of the 2008 contest, the White House competitors campaigned in key battlegrounds that President Bush won four years ago as the state-by-state Electoral College map tilts strongly in Obama’s favor. Democrats and Republicans alike say it will be extraordinarily difficult for McCain to change the trajectory of the campaign before the Nov. 4 election.

In Colorado, Obama reveled in his largest U.S. crowd to date, with local police estimating that “well over” 100,000 people packed Denver’s Civic Center Park and stretched even to the distant steps of the state Capitol.