Heading into Election Day, incumbent Jon S. Corzine held narrow leads over Republican challenger Christopher J. Christie in several polls, but those margins aren't enough to call any candidate a favorite.

Corzine's slim and recent leads in the Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey and the Farleigh Dickinson PublicMind polls, and Christie's 2-point lead in yesterday's Quinnipiac University poll show only one thing, analysts say: confused voters.

"This has been one of the most volatile electorates I've ever seen," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "People are so up in the air."

The reason for the confusion, Murray said, is that neither Corzine nor Christie has touched on the topic that pains New Jerseyans the most: property taxes.

"This has been a campaign about nothing," Murray said.

Monmouth University's final poll, released yesterday morning, shows Corzine getting 43 percent of the vote to Christie's 41. Independent candidate Chris Daggett held 8 percent of the vote.

"Jon Corzine just hasn't sealed the deal, and Chris Christie people are still up in the air," Murray said.

During his campaign, Christie, 47, vowed to cut state spending, decrease taxes and revitalize the state's industry and inner cities.

Corzine, 62, who has not ruled out tax increases, has campaigned on expanding health coverage, creating jobs and painting himself as the only one capable of righting New Jersey's economic woes.

Daggett, 59, offered a plan to cut property taxes by raising sales taxes, a proposal attacked as a tax break mostly benefitting the rich.

Corzine also has been linking himself to President Obama as much as possible, as have Democrats across the state.

Murray said that Obama's visits to cities like Camden and Newark could play a big part in getting disgruntled Democrats to vote.

"It's an effective message for Dems who plan to sit this one out," he said. "If Jon Corzine pulls this one off [today], he will have a big debt to President Obama."

Philadelphia

The city will get a new district attorney for the first time in 18 years, because incumbent Lynne Abraham decided not to run again.

Democrat Seth Williams, 42, spent 10 years as a prosecutor and supervisor under Abraham. He beat four rivals in a hotly contested Democrat primary in May.

Republican D.A. candidate Michael Untermeyer, 58, worked four years in the D.A.'s office and 11 years as an investigator in the state Attorney General's Office. He ran for sheriff as a Democrat in 2007, and has put $200,000 of his own money into his campaign.

The race for city controller pits incumbent Democrat Alan Butkovitz, 57, against Republican Al Schmidt, 38, a former federal auditor who was also executive director of the Philadelphia Republican City Committee.

Butkovitz is a lawyer and former state legislator who won the office four years ago. He says he has made the office focus more on performance reviews of critical city services than routine financial reports.

Schmidt, who has publicly criticized leaders of his own party, argues that he has the independence to be an effective fiscal watchdog.

The marquee judicial race in Pennsylvania is the hard-fought contest for state Supreme Court between Easton Democrat Jack Panella and Pittsburgh Republican Joan Orie Melvin.

Both are state Superior Court judges who've waged hard-hitting campaigns. The Supreme Court has three Democrats and three Republicans, so the election will decide the political balance of the court.

Pennsylvania voters are also electing four Superior Court judges and two Commonwealth Court judges.

In Philadelphia, four seats on Municipal Court and seven on the Common Pleas bench are on the ballot, but none is contested.

Judicial candidates in Pennsylvania are allowed to run in both Republican and Democratic primaries. In Philadelphia, Republican candidates who didn't win the Democratic primaries withdrew and were replaced on the Republican slate by winners in the Democratic primaries, eliminating all competition.