The final event of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics will be held in Massachusetts polling places Nov. 5.

As Republican W. Mitt Romney tries to parlay his pivotal role in the fiscal bailout of the Olympics into the Bay State’s highest political office, he faces Democrat Shannon P. O’Brien in a race that has grown increasingly bitter and polemic in its closing days.

On debates televised throughout the state, O’Brien and Romney have spent as much time attacking and interrupting each other as talking about their own platform, and at moments have resorted to personal insults.

Both candidates have criticized each other for running negative attack ads on TV, but neither has stopped the practice.

One Romney-sponsored ad portrays O’Brien, the current state treasurer, as a sleeping “watchdog,” unaware of special interests and Beacon Hill politicians filching the treasury.

Five days away from the election, the race remains close, with Romney and O’Brien still in a statistical dead-heat, according to the latest poll released by the Institute of Politics and New England Cable News.

But third-party challengers—Green Party candidate Jill E. Stein ’73, Libertarian Carla Howell and Independent Barbara Johnson—continue to make their presence felt by drawing critical voters away from both Romney and O’Brien.

While there are more than twice as many registered Democratic voters as Republicans in the state, there are almost as many unenrolled voters—registered voters not affiliated with a political party—as Republicans and Democrats put together.

Unenrolled voters in the state are traditionally moderate, and for both Romney and O’Brien the path to victory lies in capturing the political center. Both candidates point to their fiscal experience, and their economic plans differ only by degree. They agree on some key issues, such as MCAS, but take opposite sides on the bilingual education ballot question and the death penalty.

With third-party candidates at both ends of the political spectrum, both Romney and O’Brien have been careful not to stray too far from their respective parties’ traditional ideologies, lest they lose votes from their own parties’ bases of electoral support.

Go for the Gold

Romney has never been elected to political office—though he ran a serious challenge to U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy ’54-’56 (D-Mass.) in 1994—but he says his fiscal experience qualifies him to lead the state out of its economic slump.

In addition to saving the Salt Lake Olympics from financial disaster, Romney founded Bain Capital, the financial arm of the prominent Boston management consulting firm Bain & Co.

Romney is defending the Republicans’ 12-year hold on the governorship, but he is not the incumbent. He only entered the race this spring, when Acting Gov. Jane M. Swift dropped out.

At the time, Romney led Swift by 63 percentage points in Republican primary polls. After Swift’s departure, Romney did not face an opponent in the September primary, but he had to fight hard for his running mate, Kerry M. Healey ’82.