Hopefuls in New York and New Jersey Pack Their Final Weekend On a bright autumn day, the candidates for governor of New Jersey and mayor of New York City embraced the final days of their campaigns with rallies, bus tours and visits to diners, butcher shops - and the site of a planned garbage transfer station. In New Jersey, the race for governor on its final weekend was as lopsided as it had started. Gov. Chris Christie, who has dominated the polls throughout the campaign, was traveling the state on a bus tour that he promised would take him to all 21 counties before Election Day, and encountering crowds that treated him more like a celebrity than a politician. And in New York City, the final weekend of campaigning capped an exhausting, and costly, political marathon, as a crowd of hopefuls vied to succeed the city's three-term mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. All told, the mayoral candidates spent more than $50 million on their campaigns, according to the city's Campaign Finance Board. Mr. Christie and Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayoral nominee, have little in common other than their seemingly improbable popularity, which has proved to be a huge obstacle for their lesser-known opponents, both of whom are hoping that voters will reconsider in the final days before Tuesday's voting. With a victory on Election Day, Mr. Christie, widely viewed as a leading contender for his party's presidential nomination in 2016, would advance his reputation as a Republican with a track record of winning over coveted independent voters. Mr. de Blasio, ascending from political obscurity to the mayoralty of the nation's largest city, would instantly become one of the country's most prominent liberal officeholders. On Saturday, Mr. Christie stepped off his bus at the Bridgeway Diner in Old Bridge to a thick crowd chanting his name. As he walked inside, a pack of waitresses with cellphone cameras cheered, "Mr. President!" Mr. Christie did nothing to dissuade them, posing for photographs, and then working his way along the booths. "Come on, Granny," the governor said, sliding into a booth next to an older woman and her family, as his wife, Mary Pat, snapped photos. As Mr. Christie left out the back door, people still waiting to greet him at tables across the room shouted, "No!" and began running toward the front door to try to catch him before he got back on the bus. Mr. Christie's Democratic challenger, State Senator Barbara Buono, spoke to supporters at a banquet hall in Paterson, N.J. She was joined by New Jersey's newest United States senator, Cory A. Booker, a Democrat. Urging voters to go to the polls on Tuesday, Ms. Buono devoted most of her time to criticizing Mr. Christie. "The choice is that you stay home and you acquiesce and accept a governor whose economic policies enrich only the wealthy and cripple the middle class and the working poor," Ms. Buono said, "or you get out the vote." Polls taken heading into the campaign's final week showed how steep Ms. Buono's challenge was, even in a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 700,000 among registered voters. The Stockton Polling Institute showed Mr. Christie leading by 24 points; a poll by Quinnipiac University had him leading by 33 points, with 35 percent of likely voters not knowing enough about Ms. Buono to form an opinion. Ms. Buono has struggled against a campaign Catch-22: with little name recognition, she has had trouble raising money; with little money, she has had trouble gaining name recognition. She was getting help over the weekend from canvassers pushing in favor of a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage, which voters will also be asked to decide on Tuesday. Mr. Christie, despite his strong standing in the polls, has spent heavily on his campaign and broadcast more than a dozen television commercials. He is hoping to build a wide margin of victory so he can present himself to Republicans nationally as a presidential nominee who can win in places where the party has traditionally struggled. In New York City, Mr. de Blasio, the city's public advocate, held a pair of rallies in Manhattan as he urged his supporters to encourage their friends to vote and not to be content with the polls showing him with a large lead. Even with a relatively light schedule for the final Saturday before the election, Mr. de Blasio was an hour late for his first rally, on the Upper West Side. "I am not a morning person," he said, explaining that he had been awakened by a phone call at 5 a.m. and then had to rest for a few more hours. Reporting was contributed by Javier C. Hernández, Eli Rosenberg, Kate Taylor and Kate Zernike.