''We're still fighting the Civil War here"

[Blue_Tires]

Virginia, a former slave state and Republican stronghold, could help secure the presidency for Barack Obama if thousands of unregistered and disenfranchised black voters can be mobilised.

It is lunchtime in Petersburg and Alice McAlexander and David Nibert are on the prowl. The two Obama campaign staffers have come to the campus of Virginia State University, a historically black college that is still overwhelmingly African-American. Armed with clipboards, they fan out across the scrub lawns between the red-brick halls. “Are you registered to vote in Virginia?” shouts Nibert, clad in flip-flops and a red Obama T-shirt. The VSU students, in mottled hoodies and low-slung denim, look on curiously, but by the end of an hour-long blitz the two operatives have helped a clutch of teenagers negotiate the mauve text of the Virginia voter registration application form. “I’m excited about voting,” says one of their conquests, Davina Pitts, an 18-year-old psychology student.

The Commonwealth of Virginia, lodged above the Carolinas on America's Atlantic coast, has not voted for a Demo cratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B Johnson in 1964. (Historically, the "Solid South" of the United States was a blue stronghold, but when the Democrats announced their support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s the former Confederate states switched allegiance.) As recently as the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry wound down his Virginia campaign in August, reckoning that the state was forfeit to the Republicans.

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/10/virginia-state-vote-obama