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On the eve of Tuesday’s election, the top two mayoral candidates put aside their bitter arguments over term limits, campaign spending and the city’s schools to try to reassure voters about a more pressing worry: the economy.

With the unemployment rate at a 16-year high, tens of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and the city’s budget deficit topping $5 billion, Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offered strikingly different messages to an unsettled electorate.

Mr. Thompson, the Democrat, described two New Yorks. One, he said, was for people like Mr. Bloomberg: the superrich Manhattanites and Wall Street titans. The other was for hardworking wage-earners and small business owners who, he said, were being endlessly taxed and driven out of the city.

“We don’t have a mayor who has stood up and fought for us,” Mr. Thompson told a group of artists in Harlem.

He said the election “is about whether we go down the same path where we push people out of the city, or do we go down a different path and for the first time in years put somebody on the side of those who work each and every single day.”

Mr. Bloomberg, during a tour of the five boroughs, dropped in on small businesses and greeted commuters, stressing his financial acumen and background as a businessman.

He acknowledged the troubled economy — “it has big problems” — but did not seem eager to dwell on it, instead emphasizing the stories of small businesses that have thrived: “We’re trying to help small businesses that need loans, give them advice on how to structure a loan application, or how to deal with city government, trying to reduce taxes.”

At each stop, the mayor, who founded the giant financial data firm that bears his name, dispensed C.E.O.-knows-best advice to business owners. “The answer for small business, really,” he said, “is to find something unique — unique may be being in the neighborhood, unique may be customizing.”

He described his early days building up his business, Bloomberg L.P., after getting fired from Salomon Brothers.

“You get up every day with the thrill of doing something new, but you also go to bed at night with a sort of knot in your stomach saying, ‘I wonder if I’m going to get through,’ and most do.”

But economic pains crept into his day, sometimes in poignant, unscripted ways. After buying some pastries at Holtermann’s Bakery on Staten Island, the mayor was stopped by a man on the street who had fallen on hard times.

“Mayor Bloomberg, with all due respect, I’m ready to go bankrupt,” the man said. The mayor politely cut him off, saying, “All I can do is try to help you.”

Despite the mayor’s healthy lead in the polls, the surveys show a big divide among voters along income lines. A Marist poll released on Friday showed that among registered voters, wealthier respondents overwhelmingly support Mr. Bloomberg, while the race is essentially tied among those who make less.

Another gap exists among the boroughs; people in Manhattan and Queens strongly favor the mayor, while Mr. Thompson runs close with him in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

In some neighborhoods, resentment over Mr. Bloomberg’s spending on the race has intensified the sense of economic imbalance. The mayor is on track to spend more than $100 million to be re-elected, and some residents say his nonstop advertisements and mailings serve as reminders of how distant he is from their lives.

“He should put that money into the community,” said Lobsang Perez, 30, a fashion industry worker in Washington Heights, who stood on a street corner with his friends, complaining that that the only development in the neighborhood consisted of condominiums for the rich.

With a return to the economic theme, Mr. Bloomberg seemed to quietly remind New Yorkers of his reason for seeking a third term: that his financial expertise was required to guide the city through an extraordinary time.

It is an argument that he offered with less and less frequency as the campaign wore on, in part to distance himself from his unpopular flip-flop on term limits.

“You don’t hear the economic savior argument anymore, do you?” said City Councilman John C. Liu, the Democratic nominee for comptroller who is expected to coast to election on Tuesday. He has endorsed Mr. Thompson.

From the start of his mayoral run, Mr. Thompson has tried to summon populist rage over the city’s battered economy, but it has at times felt like a secondary theme in a campaign built around anger over term limits.

On Monday, however, the economy took center stage in his remarks, and he sought to portray Mr. Bloomberg, and his policies, as out of touch.

“We need to end this focus on just Wall Street and big business, and focus again on small businesses in New York,” Mr. Thompson said. He was short on solutions, but he lashed out at the mayor for the city’s high unemployment rate. “It is a crisis. We need jobs across the city.”

He criticized the city’s practice, under Mr. Bloomberg, of blanketing neighborhoods with parking tickets and saddling businesses with fines over small infractions.

“New York City is at war with its small businesses,” he said. “That needs to end today.”

Mr. Bloomberg appeared attuned to the criticism, rattling off his record of assisting small businesses and placing thousands of New Yorkers in jobs.

“Small businesses are the future of our city,” he said in Brooklyn. “I have friends who could easily move their businesses elsewhere, but what they tell me is the quality of the work here is better.”