And while the RNC and Romney campaign exert a centralizing influence, there is nowhere near the standardization of Obama's Starbucks-like franchise operation, each with its identical "I Support the President Because..." poster.

The Real-Estate Game

What's the point of all those campaign offices, anyway? Republicans scoff at the Obama campaign's proliferation of field offices as a symbol of a liberal big-government mentality. "The Obama campaign thinks, 'If we put 100 offices in this state, we're going to win,'" the RNC's Wiley said. "We take a smaller, smarter approach, just like we do for government. I will guarantee you they have three times as many offices in Wisconsin as we do. We decided we needed 24. Bush-Cheney in 2004 had 10."

The Obama campaign actually agrees: Real estate isn't the point. "Our focus is on having a very decentralized, organized operation as close to the precinct level as possible," Bird said. In addition to all those offices, the campaign operates out of dozens of "staging locations," many of them the living rooms of neighborhood leaders who have been working with their volunteer teams for a year or more, fanning out into the communities they know firsthand.

"Community organizing is not a turnkey operation," Bird says. "You can't throw up some phone banks in late summer and call that organizing. These are teams that know their turfs -- the barber shops, the beauty salons; we've got congregation captains in churches. These people know their communities. It's real, deep community organizing in a way we didn't have time to do in 2008."

Instead of campaign offices, the RNC likes to tout voter contacts, a metric that includes the doors knocked and phone calls made by volunteers, and which cannot be independently verified. (It still counts if no one answers the door, I was told, because the canvassers leave literature behind.) As of Tuesday, the Republicans boasted of nearly 45 million volunteer voter contacts since spring, including 9 million doors knocked, which they say is four times as many as the entire 2008 campaign and 12 times as many as the same time in the 2008 cycle. The number of phone calls made, they claim, is triple what it was at this time in 2008.

The Obama campaign doesn't release equivalent statistics, preferring to focus on publicly available data for voter registration and early voting. As of last week, there were more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania; voters do not register by party in Ohio, Virginia or Wisconsin. Republicans led in registration in Colorado and New Hampshire.

Here are the voter registration totals as of the end of last week for the swing states that register voters by party:

Democrats also say they have an edge in early voting in states where it has begun. In Iowa, North Carolina, and Nevada, more Democrats than Republicans had cast ballots as of Monday. In Ohio, more votes had been cast from precincts Obama won in 2008 than from precincts won by McCain. In Florida, more Republicans had cast ballots -- absentee balloting is typically a GOP strength in the state, and early voting, which Democrats tend to dominate, has not yet begun. But Florida Democrats note that Republicans' early advantage is reduced from this point in 2008.

Republicans counter that their partisans are outperforming their share of voter registration in early and absentee voting in many states, and that they are getting out more voters than 2008. But to the Obama campaign, the voting statistics are evidence that they are shaping an electorate to look different than the public polls. "We think that people aren't always getting it right about who and what this electorate is going to be comprised on Election Day," Messina said. "We continue to think there's going to be a higher percentage of minority and young people than some are forecasting."