“We’ve been designing and we’ve been engineering and we’ve been at the drawing board and we’ve been tinkering,” Mr. Obama said. “Now, it’s time to just take it for a drive. Let’s see how this baby runs.”

One piece of this effort can be found in a former beauty school here along South Washington Street in the suburbs of the nation’s capital. No cable television is blaring. Mr. McGowan and his team need to know only one piece of strategy: If Mr. Obama wins Virginia, a Democratic feat not achieved in 44 years, he may well win the White House.

These satellite offices, a campaign trademark that contributed to Mr. Obama’s first victory in Iowa, have been set up with the swiftness of a Starbucks franchise. While local buy-in is encouraged at the more than 700 field offices across the country, the uniformity is remarkable, down to the cardboard cutout of Mr. Obama near the front door in many locations.

What started out organically  campaign officials saw organizational promise in Virginia last year, when 20,000 signatures were gathered to make Mr. Obama the first candidate to qualify for the primary ballot  has come full circle. Now, people driving by the storefront offices are drawn in by their visibility and put to work.

The Obama campaign has broken the country into a collection of battleground states, which are dissected into precincts that are parceled one more time into neighborhood teams. (Ohio, for example, is divided into 1,231 neighborhoods.) And each of these teams, if the recruiting is up to speed, has a leader who, ideally, lives just down the block from all those doors that need to be knocked on.

The concept could well be called the 2.0 version of President Bush’s effort from his 2000 and 2004 campaigns, which outclassed Democrats and left them determined not to be out-organized again. It is supplemented by get-out-the-vote efforts from unions and other groups backing Mr. Obama, and it is benefiting from national trends, like growing anxiety over the economy, that favor Democrats nationwide.