The Obama campaign plans to open 20 new field offices in the state -- and at least five of them are in very red areas where Dems have traditionally feared to tread, Obama's Virginia director of communications, Kevin Griffis, confirms to me.

The Obama team is setting up shop in Winchester and Bristol, both of which are in areas that voted for Bush in 2004 by at least 25 points. Camp Obama is also adding an office in Harrisonburg, which went for Bush by 13 and is in the reliably-red Shenandoah Valley.

There will also be a new office in Castlewood, which is in the coalfields near West Virginia and Kentucky and went for Bush by eight, and in Martinsville, whose surrounding county went for Bush by 13 points.

This is no head fake nor is this some move to make McCain spend more money in a red state. Obama is playing to win here. I am not in the campaign and do not have access to their internal polling, but obviously they are looking at numbers that indicate it is a real race. One more obvious thing is theat they are taking a page out of Mark Warner's 2001 playbook by working to cut into traditional Republican strongholds while racking up big margins in Northern Virginia. We'll see if this works.