Voters across Cambridge will mark their ballots and choose a new City Council today, bringing to an end an intense campaign season for 19 candidates—12 of them challengers—vying for nine seats.

Challenger Ethridge A. King and his wife and campaign manager Astrid King have worked to woo the voters of Cambridge for months, and have taken the past few weeks off from their jobs to work exclusively for the campaign.

The Kings—like many of the challengers—campaigned hard through the last day yesterday, trying to garner the crucial number one votes they need to get elected.

They both admitted that they are a little nervous for the big day—and that they consider the remaining campaign “a run against time,” Astrid King said.

Yesterday, the Kings went door-to-door, distributing last-minute flyers in Cambridgeport, the campaign’s “home base.”

“We mailed here, we had events here, we brought our steel drum band through here,” Ethridge King said. “I figure my strength will come from here.”

In the brutal cold, on a street dominated by the red, green, blue, yellow and turquoise signs for incumbent councillors—from progressive Henrietta Davis to the well-established Michael A. Sullivan—the Kings canvassed unfazed.

Ethridge King’s volunteers, family and friends were making get-out-the-vote phone calls from various locations—including his home, where he had 10 extra telephone lines installed for campaign phone-banking, he said.

But the candidate said he likes the street work best.

“I’d much rather be out in the cold than calling on the phone,” King said, confiding that his business suit attire included a thermal shirt.

At the Village Grill and Seafood, a fish-and-chips joint where the Kings took a late lunch break, King confided to a woman beside him in line that “tomorrow’s the big day,” handing her a campaign leaflet.

She burst out laughing in confusion.

“Oh, I thought you were going to get married or something,” the woman said.

But a little girl in the shop knew King by name.

“Are you Ethridge King?” the girl asked. “I ate your ice cream.”