NORRISTOWN — Former Democratic President Bill Clinton and rising stars in the Republican Party flocked to Pennsylvania on Thursday to campaign for candidates just days before voters decide high-profile races for governor and U.S. Senate.

Clinton hopscotched from Erie to Bethlehem to Philadelphia to campaign for several of the state's embattled Democratic candidates, including U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, congressional challenger John Callahan and gubernatorial nominee Dan Onorato.

At a nighttime rally in Philadelphia, Clinton urged a crowd of hundreds of Temple University students to get on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to urge friends to vote for Democrats like Senate hopeful Joe Sestak, locked in a close race with Republican Pat Toomey.

Voting in Republicans would be like returning a losing coach to the helm of a football team just because a much better coach had not yet won a national championship, Clinton said at the rally, held on an outdoor plaza.

"What we're asking for is another two years," he said. "You gave them eight years to dig the hole, give us four ... to get out of it."

Earlier in the day, Clinton also spoke to more than 300 people in an Erie International Airport hangar, repeating the warning he has relayed at scores of political events nationwide. Republicans want voters to get angry and blame high unemployment and deficits on Democrats to usher in a GOP that derailed the economy in the first place back into power, he said.

"The more I got out here, the more concerned I became that the American people were going to vote out of anger and frustration and anxiety ... and get exactly what they do not want," Clinton said.

Some Republican candidates are leading their Democratic foes in Pennsylvania polls, as they ride a wave of discontent over joblessness and Democratic President Barack Obama.

Toomey, speaking to a small lunchtime crowd gathered outside the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, urged supporters not to let up in the final stretch and to persuade friends and family to vote Republican.

"I think on Nov. 2, we're going to begin the process of taking back our country, restoring the kind of prosperity that we can have, that we should have," Toomey said. "We've got to get off the track they're on in Washington. We've got the most liberal elected government in the history of the republic and they're trying to transform America into something like a European-style welfare state."

Clinton, perhaps the Democrats' biggest political star right now, swept through southeastern Pennsylvania for five events, capped by the nighttime rally at Temple.

One of those stops was a rally for Sestak at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia, where one student said she hoped Clinton's appearance would help motivate Democrats to vote.

"We've been really concerned this election cycle frankly, just with the perceived apathy, even on a college campus," said Anne Kauth, 21, of St. Paul, Minn. "Bill Clinton is a political idol for, I'm sure, the majority of this campus, so he really is the perfect person to speak to us."

On Thursday afternoon in the Philadelphia suburb of King of Prussia, two Republican governors — Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Bob McDonnell of Virginia — spoke at a rally for the party's gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett.

"The Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress have made the biggest lurch to the left in American political history," said Barbour, adding that the administration has pushed the deficit to more than $1 trillion. "They've gone on a spending spree that gives drunken sailors a bad name."

That's not all.

Two other Republican governors — Chris Christie of New Jersey and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — planned to join Barbour this morning to stump for Corbett and Toomey at two small airports in southeastern Pennsylvania before Obama arrives Saturday to fire up Democratic voters at a Philadelphia rally.

On Monday, first lady Michelle Obama will headline a rally in Philadelphia as well, where a heavy turnout by the city's large population of black voters is considered crucial to Democratic victories.

With the potential for the Toomey-Sestak contest to help decide partisan control of the U.S. Senate, Pennsylvania is a testing ground for potential GOP presidential candidates in 2012 — Pawlenty and Barbour among them — while millions of dollars from party organizations and other outside groups pour in to influence the outcome.

Meanwhile, both parties have funneled millions to Pennsylvania's gubernatorial candidates through their governors' associations.