Barack Obama is targeting the reddest of the red states in his bid for the presidency.
 
The Obama campaign is telling volunteers in Utah that they can expect quite a few paid staffers to arrive here later this summer in an effort to win over what has been the nation's most reliably Republican state in recent years. This move signals Obama's willingness to make McCain potentially put up a fight in what would ordinarily be a landslide victory, and the strategy is indicative of how Obama views the electoral map.
 
Utah is not even a "battleground" state, such as Wisconsin, Iowa or Pennsylvania. The Beehive State gave George W. Bush his largest majority of votes in both 2000 and 2004. The majority of the state's residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS, which are known to be quite conservative. In fact, the last time Utah voted for a Democrat in a presidential election was 1964 for Lyndon B. Johnson.
 
But those statistics don't matter much to Obama. In his political worldview, he is not willing to casually surrender any state, as evinced in the primaries where he meticulously campaigned in states that had small numbers of delegates. Hillary Clinton may have won the "big" states--battleground states crucial to the general election--but Obama still found a way to win more states and more delegates, in part because he takes each state seriously.
 
That philosophy can be seen in the Obama campaign's "50-state strategy," which calls for staff to be stationed in every state in the country--even remarkably red ones.
 
"We really want to give the Republicans a run for their money this year (in Utah), and I think we can," Nikki Norton, co-chairwoman of Utah for Obama, told the Deseret News this week.
 
Though Obama indicated early on in his campaign that he would embark on such an electoral strategy, his fundraising prowess has actually enabled him to do it. Jay Newton-Small makes this point in a June 10 article in Time magazine.
 
"From the earliest days of his upstart campaign, Obama pledged to run a 50-state effort, vowing to move past the traditional partisan divide and expand the electoral map by appealing to independents and even Republicans," Newton-Small writes. "But few people, even among his own staff, thought he'd actually invest in every single state. As it turns out, Obama's phenomenal fundraising has allowed him to deliver on his bold promise and place staff in every one of the 50 states, as his campaign announced it would Monday."
 
Recent polls suggest Obama's strategy may be a bit of wishful thinking for Utah. Just last month, Obama was the favorite of 27 percent of registered voters, compared to 62 percent for McCain. When it comes to Utah, Obama can at least be thankful he's not going up against Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who amassed 90 percent of the vote in Utah's Republican primary on Super Tuesday.
 
But even if Obama does not ultimately win Utah's electoral votes, his campaign's presence here could prove a wise move for the general election as a whole. If Obama is able to stay even moderately competitive with McCain in Utah, it will force the Republican nominee to spend time and money defending a state that he otherwise would be taking for granted.
 
Perhaps this is the Obama campaign's real motive--to use its resources to keep McCain on the defensive and force him to shuttle back and forth from battleground states to red states, essentially losing precious time and money. The real battle in Utah then may not be over electoral votes, but over which candidate can more skillfully use his resources.
 
"We want to make (McCain) work," Norton told the Deseret News. "We have the resources to do it. We'll see if McCain has the resources."