Presidential campaigns ramp up in Virginia

RICHMOND — For months, Republicans stood on the sidelines as President Obama gradually ramped up his reelection campaign in battleground Virginia.

Not anymore.

Graphic

Map shows where Democrats and Republicans are setting up offices in Virginia and how each county voted in the last presidential election.

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After a pair of recent visits by the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney , Republicans angling to win back the White House have opened a dozen campaign offices across the state.

“We are not finished investing in Virginia,’’ said Pete Snyder, chairman of the GOP’s coordinated campaign in the commonwealth to elect Republicans up and down the ticket. “Our base is fired up.”

While Democrats have made a splashy entrance in Virginia with fundraisers, well-attended rallies and plenty of headlines, Republicans have been much more low-key. The party has worked behind the scenes, with almost no interest in touting its strategy to deny Obama a repeat victory here.

“We fully expect this to be hotly contested, with the two teams battling it out, but we have the enthusiasm on the ground,” said Brian Moran, chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia. Obama is scheduled to make a campaign swing through the state on Friday and Saturday.

Neither presidential campaign would speak publicly about its strategy in Virginia but privately both pledged to outperform the other in door-knocking, phone calls and voter registration as they vie for 13 Electoral College votes.

Both campaigns have paid staff in most regions of the state. Obama’s campaign already has 40 field organizers and nearly 20 offices. Meanwhile, the Romney camp has more than 20 branches, raised $200,000 in the state since the Supreme Court upheld the Obama health-care law, and registered voters and recruited volunteers at nearly 30 events statewide on July Fourth.

Democrats expect to surpass their party’s efforts in 2008, when they masterminded what many consider to be the state’s most comprehensive political organization in modern history. Republicans plan to triple their contacts to potential voters from their all-time high in 2009 — 2.5 million calls and 500,000 knocks on doors — when Robert F. McDonnell handily won the governorship.

Recent polls show Obama with a slight lead in Virginia, although most surveys rely on data that predate Romney’s clinching of the GOP nomination. A Washington Post poll in May had Obama ahead of Romney, 51 percent to 44 percent, among registered state voters.

Political observers think that Obama could win the general election without carrying Virginia but that the state is crucial for Romney.

Bob Holsworth, a commentator and former political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said state Republicans grumbled for weeks that Romney’s campaign infrastructure lagged in Virginia. The office openings, he said, would help alleviate those concerns.

In 2008, Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Virginia in 44 years. But since then, Democrats have lost ground to Republicans, who won statewide elections in 2009, a commanding majority of Virginia’s congressional delegation in 2010 and the state Senate in 2011.