Politics
Election 2012: Obama campaign using voter registration to win North Carolina
U.S. President Barack Obama (l) and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. PHOTO/File
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.
