TAMPA -- Inside a converted cigar factory in the heart of Ybor City, a group of Barack Obama staffers hunch over their laptops in intense, nearly silent concentration. This is the nerve center of Obama's Florida operation, and the election is four days away.

Steve Schale, 34, Obama's state director and the brain behind the campaign, glances over the rows of lawyers, researchers, communications staffers and field directors who are putting into action the campaign's final-hours effort to get out the vote.

''It's my job now to just get out of the way,'' he says.

He has scratched out a prediction on a piece of paper: Obama takes Florida, 50-46 percent. But the crumpled scrap he carries with him belies his greatest fear: that the Illinois senator loses Florida, and in doing so, the White House.

In the previous four months, the campaign registered 200,000 new voters in Florida, opened 50 state field offices, recruited 600,000 volunteers and allocated $40 million to fight John McCain. Under Schale's direction, it amassed a grassroots organization so far-reaching that even Republican strategists say it will change the way politics is practiced in Florida.

''They've done everything right and very few things wrong,'' said Sally Bradshaw, former campaign manager for Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and now a political consultant. ``They've figured it out. They've broken the code.''

The strategy not only helped Obama rebound from his primary-inflicted wounds to win Florida, it brought him victories in key Republican strongholds such as the I-4 corridor and gave him better margins than John Kerry's 2004 campaign in 36 of 38 counties.

(The Miami Herald requested behind-the-scenes access to both camps in the final days of the Florida campaign, in hopes of telling the inside story from whichever side was victorious. The McCain campaign declined. The Obama campaign agreed, as long as it was understood the story wouldn't appear until after the election.)

For Schale, the waning days of the campaign have come down to this: ``We have tried to anticipate anything and everything and we don't take a damn thing for granted.''

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Obama's Florida strategy was thorough and simple: ask every supporter to help, give every volunteer a job, register every eligible voter, get ''sporadic'' voters to the polls, and bring the campaign to every pocket of the state.

The campaign did it by dividing the state into five regions, or ''pods,'' each with its own staff and message geared to regional concerns. It harnessed social networking on the Internet and cell phones to allow grassroots organizers set up their own voter registration drives, home-grown phone banks and text messaging chains.

''If this works, it's hard to think this isn't the academic model of the future,'' Schale muses on the Saturday before Election Day. ``We started out with the premise that, with our volunteer numbers, there was no reason we couldn't organize anywhere in Florida.'''

Florida represents a convergence of the national campaign's community-organizer approach and Schale's view of the state, shaped by two years as political director for House Democrats in which he helped reverse the party's decline by wresting nine legislative seats from Republican control.

Now Schale, who grew up in St. Augustine, also wants to exorcise the demons of Florida's troubled election history, including the 2000 debacle that gave George W. Bush the White House and made Florida ``the punching bag of the nation.''

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@