It remained active between campaigns in lobbying for the president’s health care plan, and had a dry run last November, helping re-elect Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx.

Lamb is example of that continuity.

After working as an Obama volunteer in 2008, she kept all her email contacts to easily build a new campaign group for this election. She began working as a neighborhood team leader a year ago.

The Garner office is one of 54 Obama offices around North Carolina. That compares with 24 offices for the Romney campaign.

As a volunteer, Lamb said she works 10 to 14 hours per day, seven days a week. She sees her husband at about two meals per week, and said she hasn’t seen her granddaughters in two weeks.

“There are telephone calls to be made, there is paperwork to get done, there is (campaign literature) packs to be done, there is cleaning out the toilet,” Lamb said. “It’s very intense.”

She said she supports Obama for a number of reasons. She is afraid what a Republican victory would mean for the U.S. Supreme Court, and in particular for women’s rights and environmental issues. And she supports the ability of people to have access to heath insurance – even more so after her 37-year-old son was laid off from work and lost his health insurance soon after he’d had triple bypass surgery.

“I had a lot of concerns last time, and I have more concerns this time around on a personal level,’’ she said. “Big things require big commitments. Its a very big deal.”

The Obama campaign says it doesn’t know how many volunteers it has working in North Carolina, but conservatively puts the figure at between 15,000 and 20,000. The Romney campaign says it has about 10,000 volunteers in the state.

The most dedicated Obama volunteers are broken into neighborhood teams of five or six individuals. Each has a team leader, a canvass leader, a phone bank leader, and a data entry person. There are some 400 neighborhood teams across the state.

Supporting the volunteer operation is a staff, made up overwhelmingly of young people. The Obama campaign is famously reticent to talk about staff, but Democrats say there are about 350 Obama field staffers – apparently fewer than the estimated 400 staffers that were here in 2008.

North Carolina is particularly well-suited for the traditional ground game because at 22 percent it has the largest African-American population of any of the battleground states. There is more of a tradition of neighborhood political organizing in the black community.

The Obama campaign has heavily worked the historically black campuses – sending in political figures such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson to N.C. Central University in Durham or singer Alicia Keys to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro.

Telisha Johnson, a 21-year old chemistry major at NCCU from Kinston, who showed up to see Jackson, said she had received at least 10 emails from the campaign reminding her to vote.

GOP reaches out, too

The Republicans have similar methods to reach their supporters.

Volunteers like Dan and Emily Henson are armed with a computer generated list of supporters with a lower propensity to vote.

Those voters will receive a visit at home or a phone call every day until they vote, Romney staffers said.

The phone calls are likely to come from the Wake County GOP office in North Raleigh. An hour after the Hensons finished canvassing Saturday, a dozen other volunteers sat in front of phones, dialing numbers that appeared on the screen. Every day, volunteers are calling thousands of voters across the state. “We’re at capacity every day,” Joffrion said.

The Hensons’ roster included many voters like Steve Zera.

“Can Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Pat McCrory and the Republican ticket expect your support in this November’s election?” Emily asked Zera when he answered the door in Wake Forest.

Like many conservatives, Zera said he didn’t start as a big Romney fan. But he warmed to the candidate after the first debate and strongly opposes the president. “I’m enthusiastic in the sense that I don’t like the way the last four years have been,” he said in an interview after the Hensons visited.

Zera said he planned to vote this week if the weather improved.

Romney aides declined to disclose specific targets, saying they didn’t want to telegraph strategy. They dissect voters down to minutia levels. Most efforts now focus on turnout, not persuasion, but if Romney strategists see a need, they can switch the phone script and realign the target pool at any point. “It’s all about flushing out and finding individual voters, regardless of where they are,” Joffrion said.