A bad political dream motivated Clifford Rees to become a campaign foot soldier in the presidential battleground state of New Mexico.

A retired state worker, Rees vividly recalls dreaming he awoke on Nov. 5 — the day after the general election — and experienced "that same sinking feeling that I had after the general elections in 2000 and 2004, that my candidate had lost. Only this time I realized I could do more, that I needed to get off my couch ... to make my direct contribution to the results of this campaign in 2008."

Rees joined thousands of others volunteering for Democrat Barack Obama's campaign. He's walked door-to-door, talking to people in the Santa Fe area about why he supports the Illinois senator. He's worked on the campaign's phone bank operation — calling potential voters to urge them to cast a ballot for Obama.

Rees represents one cog in the critical machinery of politics — the so-called groundgame — that could make the difference in which candidate wins New Mexico, a swing state in presidential elections. Four years ago, Republican George Bush carried the state by 5,988 votes. Democrat Al Gore won New Mexico in 2000 by a mere 366 votes.

"I worked in a political environment for 25 years in state government but didn't see myself as a political activist, in terms of being a partisan activist," says Rees, a 56-year-old lawyer who retired in 2005. "I have never been really this fired up about a national candidate in a long time."

To win New Mexico, Obama needs strong turnout and solid margins in Democratic strongholds like Santa Fe and other counties in Northern New Mexico. That will help offset Republican John McCain's strength in GOP-friendly Southern New Mexico.

Unlike past campaigns in New Mexico — Democrat or Republican — Obama has blanketed the state with 39 offices, each having at least one paid Obama staffer. That's nearly four times more offices than Republican John McCain has in the state.

Historically, campaigns focused their resources in the largest communities — Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Santa Fe, which account for just over a third of the state's voting-age population. But the Obama campaign planted its operations in smaller communities and rural areas as well, from Raton and Tucumcari to Anthony and Alamogordo. Offices sprouted in areas of the state that went solidly GOP in the last presidential election — in Roswell, Carlsbad and Deming in Southern New Mexico and Farmington and Aztec in northwestern New Mexico. In Lea County, which Bush won 4-to-1 in 2004, the Obama campaign runs an office in Hobbs, an oil and natural gas producing center.

"There are folks down there who lean Democratic or are Democratic voters. I think one of the mistakes we have made in the past is not having a presence there and doing something with the support out in these rural areas in places like Hobbs and Roswell," says Adrian Saenz, state director of Obama's New Mexico operation. "We think by not just having an office for the sake of having an office, but having an office for the sake of organizing our volunteers and getting them to turn out not just themselves, but their neighbors, is how we establish a presence in those ... not so Democratic friendly areas."

Republican John McCain has 10 offices across New Mexico, with a majority of them in southern and eastern portions of the state that have favored Republicans in past presidential races. Some of the offices are staffed by volunteers. However, the campaign maintains that it doesn't need to match Obama's network of offices to run effective voter persuasion and get-out-the-vote operations through mailings, phone banks and canvassing.

"We have hundreds of volunteers reaching out to voters per week through phone banking and door knocking," says Ivette Barajas, a spokeswoman for McCain's campaign. "We also have various coalitions, like Vets for McCain, Women for McCain, Students for McCain that provide outreach to specific voters to help get out why Sen. McCain understands the issues that matter most to them."

Obama's campaign applies the lessons the candidate learned during his days as a community organizer in Chicago. His field offices serve as recruiting and coordinating stations for volunteers, who function as a motivated sales force as they spread out across neighborhoods and precincts.

"The emphasize is on the face-to-face, one-to-one, person-to-person, neighbor-to-neighbor contact as the most powerful form of political persuasion," says Rees, who attended "neighborhood team" training during the summer.

"For me personally ... I think it's a reaction to the impersonal way that campaigns have been conducted through the media, robo calls and attack ads on television and on radio. This is a refocus back towards the way I believe campaigns probably used to be run, which was neighbor-to-neighbor, person-to-person, rather than through the impersonal electronic media."

Saenz says volunteers — Obama's political army — are critical.

"The phone calls we are making and every one of our door knocks are all done by volunteers. We have all these staffers around the state — more paid staffers than we've had before — but they are there so they can recruit and coordinate our volunteer activities," he says.

On a recent brisk but sunny fall weekend morning, Rees joined about 40 others in squeezing into a small Obama office in a shopping center on Santa Fe's south side for a canvassing briefing. Worn metal chairs, white plastic patio chairs and used office furniture fill the room along with 14 desktop computers, which are used to keypunch data about voters gathered by phone banks and door-to-door visits.

Each canvasser receives a packet — a list of addresses, a map, a script of possible talking points, information on early voting — and is told how to fill out prepared, coded sheets on their voter contacts. They're reminded to provide absentee ballot applications to people interested in voting by mail. The campaign will make follow-up phone calls to verify that people received their absentee ballots and returned them. Two more waves of canvassers are deployed later in the day, some returning to houses in which nobody was at home earlier when volunteers initially stopped.

"There is a certain urgency in the air right now," Alfred Johnson, regional field director for Obama's campaign, tells volunteers before they head out the door. "One month ... and we're all going to be watching the next president of the United States."