Obama using voter registration to stay close in NC

RALEIGH, N.C. — Dozens of volunteers armed with clipboards and voter registration forms gather at President Barack Obama's field office here every day. Their mission: Fan out across the city seeking new voters in this rapidly growing state.

"Are you registered to vote at your current address?" asks Douglas Johnston, a volunteer wooing voters outside the county courthouse. "Do you know about early voting?"

The effort, it seems, has borne fruit — to the tune of more than 250,000 new registered voters in North Carolina since April 2011, according to Obama's team. That's more new voters than the campaign has registered anywhere else in the country.

It's an eye-popping total in a state that Obama won by just 14,000 votes four years ago. And the flood of new voters — presumably a chunk of them Democrats — could help keep North Carolina within the president's reach in a year when everything else here seems to be working in Republican Mitt Romney's favor.

North Carolina has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate just twice in 40 years. The state's economy is abysmal; its 9.7 percent unemployment rate is among the nation's highest. And the president's embrace of gay marriage put him at odds with a majority of North Carolina voters, including many blacks, who make up the core of his support here.

But less than six weeks from Election Day, Romney is spending millions of dollars in television advertising in North Carolina, defending territory that remains more conservative than most of the states that will decide the election. That raises questions about his chances in places like Ohio, Florida and Virginia, where polls show him trailing the president.

Compared with Obama, Romney has fewer paths to victory in the state-by-state contest to cobble together enough wins to reach the requisite 270 Electoral College votes. That makes North Carolina's 15 electoral votes more important to him than to Obama, who could still win the White House without a North Carolina victory.

Romney's campaign won't say how many new voters they have registered in the state. But Republicans credit their field work with a party advantage in absentee voting requests in North Carolina, where they say they lead 48 percent to 31 percent for Democrats.

Of course, registration numbers alone don't tell the whole story in North Carolina. Democrats have long outnumbered Republicans in the state, even though voters sided with GOP presidential candidates for decades. Democratic registration has fallen by about 90,000 since the end of 2008, while unaffiliated voters have increased by more than 250,000. Republican registration is up by about 5,000 during that same timeframe.

A shortage of independent polls in North Carolina makes the state's status 40 days out hard to judge. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll out Thursday showed Obama leading Romney among likely voters 48 percent to 46 percent.

But both parties say the race is tight.

"Changing demographics have made this state more competitive than past years," said Robert Reid, Romney's North Carolina communications director. But he expressed confidence that the lagging economy would help the Republican win a close contest.

"The race is, and has been, within the margin of error," said Ken Eudy, a veteran Democratic strategist in North Carolina.

North Carolina's rapid transition from a GOP stalwart to a presidential battleground has largely been due to increased voter registration of African-Americans and Hispanics, as well as of transplants from the Northeast.

They're people like Diana Hrabosky, a Democrat who just moved to the state and registered to vote on Wednesday with an Obama campaign volunteer. And Walter Woody III, who recently turned 18 and is eligible to vote for the first time.