Obama campaign mobilizes; is NC ripe for the picking?

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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The NYC, like so many others, has the story:

RALEIGH, N.C. — Under a scorching sun, hundreds of people lined up recently in a parking lot here to pick up free back-to-school supplies being distributed by a local radio station. Bobbing among the shade umbrellas were a handful of workers for Senator Barack Obama, carrying clipboards and voter registration forms.

On Monday night, others fanned out at a movie screening for surfers in Wrightsville Beach. They descended on a street festival in Asheville. When oil companies posted record profits, Obama supporters showed up at gas stations here with registration forms.

Despite the relentless heat, and midsummer lull, the Obama campaign is mobilizing in North Carolina. The state is one of half a dozen once-solid Republican bastions, including Georgia, Indiana and Virginia, where Democrats now sniff opportunity to expand the electoral map.

They hope that North Carolina’s growth, especially among high-tech workers in Research Triangle Park, will help change voting patterns that are decades old. But the Obama strategy relies on a surge among black voters and young people, two groups that have not turned out in great numbers in recent elections.

To that end, the organization of Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has been conducting an intense registration drive, appearing wherever people gather, as well as singling out potential voters in neighborhoods and online, and reaching out to undecided voters. It has also reactivated the extensive volunteer network it built before crushing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton here in the May primary, and it is already running television commercials.

The campaign of the presumed Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, by contrast, has been barely visible. But his camp says it is getting in gear, and it has history on its side.

North Carolina has not voted for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Even with John Edwards, then one of the state’s senators, on the ticket in 2004, the Democrats lost here in a landslide. But they say the state is ripe this year for picking.

“The dynamics here are different than they ever have been,” said Mr. Obama’s state director, Marc Farinella, pointing to the influx of about 600,000 people since 2004.