SWING STATES, BATTLEGROUNDS AND TOSS-UPS: HOW N.C. MIGHT DECIDE THE ELECTION

Sixty-one-year-old Donna Sorgi has found herself a long way from home this election season.

Employing her natural "helicopter mom" skills, as she calls them, the Boston resident has spent many of her days on Main West Quadrangle in the past month, tirelessly ushering straggling Duke students into the early voting site in the West Union Building, as well as banging on doors and making telephone calls in Durham as a full-time volunteer for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's campaign.

What motivates the North Carolina native, hailing from a conservative family, to leave her life behind in Massachusetts and sacrifice a month of her time for the Illinois senator?

"I'm volunteering on a personal level because I want my home state of North Carolina to go for a Democrat regardless of skin color," Sorgi said. "When I grew up here, Barack Obama couldn't sit next to me here on a city bus. Imagine that-it would have been illegal. In my lifetime, he could be my president and North Carolina could go to him. That is important to me."

The kicker? Sorgi says her 81-year-old mother, whom she confessed may have once voted for ultraconservative former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., is now also a fervent Obama supporter.

The story of Sorgi and her mother is echoed in the story of North Carolina in this year's presidential race as a whole. It is the tale of a once-reliable vanguard of conservatism transformed into an electoral toss-up.

Surrounded by her immovable Southern sisters, North Carolina is now the prodigal son, the rebel of the bunch, along with the other surprise swing state of Virginia.

In the immediate run-up to the election, the most recent polls show Obama and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in a statistical dead heat.

The transformed demographic landscape of the state, shaped by an influx of minority and young voters and dissatisfaction with the current economic outlook, has given Obama an untapped pool of persuadable voters to woo, Guillory said.

"The national politics and state politics have changed a lot since 2004," said Paul Cox, spokesperson for the Obama campaign in North Carolina, noting its efforts to register and organize voters. "It's a game-changer.... Whether we win or lose tomorrow, we now have that many more people involved in the political process, and that's going to have a lasting impact."

In pursuit of these new voters as well as those disenchanted with the current administration, the Obama campaign has poured money and resources into the state following his victory over rival Sen. Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina Democratic primary May 6, forcing McCain to play defense.

The result of these collective efforts in North Carolina is a network of 90 campaign offices crisscrossing the state for McCain and for Obama, numerous visits by both presidential candidates and their surrogates to the state in the past month and warring yard signs in many neighborhoods-the "Change We Can Believe In" countering the "Country First" on opposite sides of the streets.

"We expected it to be competitive, but we are dealing with an anomaly in North Carolina where we have close races at every level," said N.C. GOP spokesperson Brent Woodcox, acknowledging that the state has experienced a shift in its political landscape.

But Guillory noted that only a minority of N.C. voters consider themselves liberal.

"This state does not swing back towards liberals. There are not enough liberals in this state to swing liberal," Guillory said. "You can't win an election in this state by running as an out-and-out liberal."

Most election observers agreed that Obama's recent success in the polls in North Carolina is not due to an overall ideological shift in the state, but rather the candidate's ability to transcend partisan lines and the historicity of his bid for the White House.

"North Carolina is more conservative than the nation as a whole," said David Smudski, chair of the Durham County Republican Party. "The people are conservative. Whether or not we can get them out to vote for candidates that are actual conservatives-that's the question."

Evidence of this fact can be seen in Joan Reynolds, a full-time McCain volunteer sent from Alabama by the Republican National Committee.

Working in Durham, considered one of the most liberal counties in North Carolina according to voter registration records, Reynolds dons a baby pink McCain-Palin T-shirt every morning and shows up at the Durham Victory Office to help out in any way she can, sometimes at the cost of getting a few doors slammed in her face.

"It's very well worth taking time away from my family to be able to see if I can make a differences in areas that need help," Reynolds said. "I just feel like people are missing something in the two Republican candidates we have, and we've got to tell them, 'Look here's the difference.'"

The unprecedented battle over the state has mobilized voters in a way North Carolinians cannot recall in recent history.

The campaign offices of Obama and McCain in Durham buzz with activity. Those who have never before volunteered for a political campaign before drop by to devote an hour or two to their respective candidate, while the die-hards man the phones and dispatch their peers throughout Durham for eight to nine hours every day.

"People who have never voted before are voting. That's where the excitement is. They are realizing, 'If I don't do that, I will have no opinion, and I have to have my opinion heard,'" said Celine Goue-Sai of Durham, who stationed herself outside Alpine Bagels during early voting to get out the vote on behalf of "Dems for B.J. Lawson." "We're talking about people who are 40, 45, even 50-year-olds coming in to vote for the first time."

No matter which candidate comes out on top, however, experts and political activists suspect that competitive politics in North Carolina is here to stay.

"Something is afoot here that people might not have expected," Sorgi said. "This is a new thing that's happening."