"TOPEKA, Kan. -- More than just a trip to his Kansas roots, Sen. Barack Obama's visit to his grandfather's home town Tuesday is part of a broad and unorthodox strategy to build support in Republican-dominated states.

In Kansas and Idaho, Utah and Alaska, Obama's goal is to win delegates on Feb. 5 and to convince voters that he can compete where Democrats normally cannot.

It was October when Obama's first paid staffers arrived here -- a state that offers just 32 delegates -- three months before Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's earliest organizers. Eighteen Obama workers now cover Kansas, and the Clinton team has three.

Two members of Congress stumped for Obama here last weekend, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union address Monday night, is widely expected to endorse him.

The Obama team hopes his message will connect with Kansas voters weary of the partisanship that not only split Republicans and Democrats, but has divided social conservatives from moderates in the state GOP. While several Democrats have won state races recently, Kansas has not backed a Democrat for president since 1964.

Aside from winning delegates in a nomination battle that could go on for weeks, a central component of Obama's strategy is to attract new voters. Obama television ads have begun to appear in at least 11 Super Tuesday states, including Alabama, New Mexico, Utah, Delaware and Alaska.

"Showing the ability to perform well across the country, particularly against Senator Clinton, who was the inevitable national front-runner for most of the campaign, has great value," said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager. "If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, the night of November 3rd we're going to be talking about a lot more states in play than Senator Clinton."

The value of the strategy remains unproven. Every hour and dollar that Obama spends in a place like Kansas is energy and money not spent in states that provide a more traditional path to the nomination. On Super Tuesday, 23 delegates will be in play in Utah and 55 in Colorado, a pittance compared with California's 370 and New York's 232. Even if Obama does well in the smaller states, he will be waging a war of perception if Clinton does better in the major battlegrounds.

Obama also must contend with a question his troops faced in earlier contests: How will a campaign that relies on converts and new faces compare with the Clinton strategy, which focuses on unions and other party regulars experienced in nomination battles?

"Probably the people who are organizing the best and helping us the most are the labor union people and also some of the regular Democrats who have always been there," said Clinton Kansas co-chair Dan Lykins, the state party treasurer since 1992. "I know that when they say they're going to work, they will. These are the same active Democrats who have been helping our party for 20 or 30 years."

The Clinton campaign tends to dismiss the Obama strategy as making a virtue out of necessity.

"It's very hard to gain a big advantage in small states," said one Clinton strategist, who noted that Clinton is concentrating her early fire on four states -- California, New York, New Jersey and Arkansas -- that will produce 44 percent of the Feb. 5 delegates. She will go head-to-head with Obama in a string of sizeable states, while limiting her ground efforts elsewhere.

In the Democratic nomination fight, more states are being courted and coveted than most strategists imagined a few months ago. Obama and Clinton each won two of the year's first four contests and come equipped with campaign coffers that match their national ambitions. Money and staff that might have seemed wasted on Kansas, North Dakota or Idaho in years past could prove important if the race remains close.

A high point of Obama's efforts here came Jan. 17, when 13 Kansas legislators gathered in the statehouse rotunda to endorse him. Two things about the event stood out: the legislators' description of how hard Obama's team worked for their support and the fact that this happened in Kansas.

"People are generally very surprised to hear from us," Obama volunteer Cori Allen said as she made calls in Lawrence that night. "When you call back in Kansas, people will say literally, 'You want to talk to me?' Even the Republicans stay on the line longer."

Kansas, with its record of Democrats winning office by drawing support among moderate Republicans, is one of a half-dozen Feb. 5 caucus states where ground organization is considered crucial. Obama, who likes to say he got his name from Kenya and his accent from Kansas, enjoys the added benefit of Kansas kin. He will hold a rally Tuesday in his grandparents' town of El Dorado.

Obama staffers, arriving when their candidate was stuck far back in the polls, began last fall to pull people together in whatever constellations they could muster. On the day before Thanksgiving, they started to see progress when 36 people from the state's conservative western reaches came to a meeting in Wichita.

One tack was to reach out to Democratic state legislators. The idea was to enlist surrogates who could help introduce the freshman senator. In one twist borrowed from the community organizing playbook, they called some legislators only after mustering activists. By saying voters in their districts were supporting Obama, the staffers persuaded the politicians to take a closer look.

"It's a response to voters who are telling us whom we should support," said state Sen. Anthony Hensley (D), the Senate minority leader, who endorsed Obama. He was one of a few legislators who heard from the campaigns of all three major Democratic candidates. Only one among the dozen who stood with him had heard from another campaign.

"I was repeatedly contacted and offered ways to get involved," Sen. Marci Francisco said of the Obama campaign. Sen. David Haley said the Obama campaign is as well organized in his Kansas City district as any local campaign he has seen in 20 years. "They had the foresight to prepare," he said.

Obama's pitch in Kansas echoes the approach that helped make Sebelius a popular two-term governor. Sebelius has built a working coalition with the help of moderate Republicans who cannot abide the state's fiery social conservatives. In fact, her lieutenant governor, Mark Parkinson, is a former chairman of the state Republican Party.

"Kansas Democrats can't win on their own. They have to reach out to independents and Republicans," said Dan Watkins, former executive director of the state Democratic Party and an Obama supporter. "This is Obama country."

Kansas has proven reliability Republican in presidential contests, but significant numbers of independents and moderate Republicans have voted Democratic in congressional and statewide races.

Rep. L. Candy Ruff, a conservative Democrat, endorsed Obama. She thinks Obama would be a bigger asset than Clinton if he appeared at the top of the ticket. She has no illusions that Kansas will swing the race, but she likes being in the mix.

"If the big states split their vote, it's down to the little states, the crumbs on the bottom," Ruff said. "That's where we could be in play."" (Peter Slevin, Washington Post, January 29, 2008)