McCain Forced to Fight for Virginia

"Until Sarah Palin was nominated, there was absolutely no enthusiasm for McCain's candidacy," said Farris, who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1993. "People were resigned to vote for him, but that was it. There was no reaching out. No one asked us to do anything. In the last few weeks, people have asked us. So we're going to do it."

Obama's campaign has staged huge voter-registration drives that have gone unmatched by McCain, according to local registrars, who say they are swamped by Obama's efforts.

In Fairfax alone, election officials processed about 1,000 applications per day before the deadline this month, General Registrar Rokey W. Suleman II said. A total of 61,000 registrants signed up in the county this year.

Although voters do not register by party in Virginia, Suleman said the vast majority of the new registrants probably are Obama supporters because virtually all the applications have come from drives led by groups backing the candidate. Suleman said he has seen no registration drives by the McCain campaign.

McCain has 20 "victory centers" in the state, but that is about a third of the campaign offices his rival has. Obama's 3,000 volunteers knocked on 262,000 doors on a recent weekend -- a huge number compared with the 300,000 doors that Democrats knocked on during the state's 2005 gubernatorial campaign.

By comparison, McCain's volunteers personally contacted 130,000 voters with a combination of phone calls and door-knocking during a recent week, a senior campaign strategist said.

Evidence that McCain's efforts are trailing is especially stark across voter-rich Northern Virginia. On an early October weekend, Obama's 16 offices buzzed, while McCain's five were nearly deserted.

In West Springfield, Republican volunteer Fred Tsai sat alone at the front counter of an isolated McCain campaign office. Another volunteer could be heard making phone calls in a back room, but no one else appeared during a 15-minute period on a Saturday morning. "We just opened up this past week," Tsai said.

Down the road, at least 200 volunteers overflowed out of a storefront Obama operation in southern Fairfax as they waited for instructions on going door to door. Many had driven down from the District and Maryland; many others had found the location through the Obama campaign Web site.

Similarly, in Gainesville in western Prince William, two young McCain volunteers sat alone by the phones in a cavernous new campaign office. But in Dumfries, Obama volunteers and paid staff fielded a steady stream of eager supporters wanting to help.

At the McCain office in Sterling on a recent Sunday afternoon, three people made calls at a bank of about 20 phones. "We may not have as many offices as Obama," said Kevin Brown, 18, one of the three. "But we've got a lot of spirit."

Trey Walker, McCain's top operative for the mid-Atlantic region, described those examples as the "normal ebb and flow" of a phone-bank operation.