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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Eight years after Florida stretched Election Night out 36 days, Team Obama has plowed tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of paid staff into the state in a gambit to wrap up this November's election early -- like 8 p.m. on the East Coast -- with a Sunshine State knockout.

A perennial indicator of the statewide result is the Tampa Bay region, whose tallies typically are almost finished by the time the polls close in the western Panhandle, an hour after those in the peninsula. If Barack Obama is ahead in Tampa Bay, chances are good that he will carry the state.

And if Obama carries the state and its 27 electoral votes, even most Republican analysts concede that John McCain almost certainly cannot reach the 270 needed to win the presidency. Never mind Colorado and its nine votes. What does it matter about Minnesota and its 10? The game would already be over.

Which is why, just days after McCain's post-convention bounce sparked speculation about when Obama would pull out of Florida for greener pastures, the Democratic nominee was in Miami, laying out his quick-win scenario to a living room full of $30,000-a-pop donors.

"I'll tell you, we can win this thing without Florida.... But, boy, it's a lot easier if we win Florida," Obama declared.

A recent Mason-Dixon poll sheds some light on Obama's optimism: It showed him with a 2-point lead statewide and a 6-point lead in the bellwether, five-county Tampa Bay area. Subsequent polls have shown those margins increasing, with Quinnipiac giving Obama an 11-point edge in Tampa Bay. Unlike North Florida, which is culturally the Old South, or southeastern Florida, which in places resembles New York or New Jersey, the Tampa Bay area is a mix of old Florida families, new transplants, and generally centrist politics that offers a political microcosm of the entire state. The region anchors the southwest terminus of Interstate 4, historically a swing corridor in Florida. It's where Obama planted his state headquarters flag when he was chasing Hillary Rodham Clinton a year ago and where he sequestered himself to prep for his first debate with McCain.

The Tampa headquarters coordinates a string of field offices that reach into most of Florida's 67 counties, including such Democrat-unfriendly places as Pensacola in Escambia County. "We're not running only a base-centric election," says Steve Schale, Obama's Florida director. "Three or four points of movement in Escambia can allow an increase in base turnout elsewhere to put us over the top."

Schale's hand on the helm is proof of Obama's superior strategy here compared with that of his recent predecessors. The 33-year-old political operative turned heads in 2006 when he engineered the Democratic recapture of seven state House seats, the first such turn of the tide in more than two decades.

Previous Democratic presidential campaigns have tended to parachute operatives in from national headquarters for the final two months, with the first few weeks spent learning Florida's peculiar political landscape. Schale, who has lived in Florida for 23 years, instead runs a heavily Floridian shop on a scale that dwarfs previous efforts by either party.

In 2004, Democrat John Kerry had 15 Florida offices by October. Schale had 40 in August and close to 60 by the end of September, with some 400 paid staffers. In contrast, the massive Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election effort had 250 paid workers; the McCain operation has about 90.

Schale's employees, in turn, have organized thousands of volunteers, who last week wrapped up their voter-registration effort and now are focusing on turnout for early voting, which starts on October 20.

In tandem with the groundwork is the air campaign, which Obama kicked up a notch three weeks ago to $1.9 million in TV ads, from $1.2 million the week before. McCain, who is coordinating his television advertising with the Republican National Committee, spent $700,000 on spots in that time period, down from $1.1 million, according to Evan Tracey at TNS Media Intelligence.

Overall, the month of September in Florida saw $7.6 million in Obama ads against only $3 million for McCain.

Many Florida Republicans insist that the state remains reliably Republican, noting that voters twice elected Jeb Bush as governor and, in 2006, opted for another Republican, Charlie Crist, to succeed him.

State Republicans acknowledge that Schale has done an admirable job of putting together the basics -- building a high-quality voter database, organizing in every county, recruiting plenty of volunteers, and banking absentee ballots -- but they counter that Republicans have been doing these things, and doing them well, since the early 1990s with an army of dedicated volunteers that returns election after election.

"It's a good operation that's been tested time and time again," says McCain's Florida director, Arlene DiBenigno. The former top Crist aide adds that she prefers "quality over quantity."

It will be much harder, DiBenigno and others say, for Obama's campaign to transform first-time registrants into actual voters than it will be for McCain's people to take advantage of the state party's turnkey operation.

Finally, Republicans point to the nearly $9 million that Obama spent on television ads over the summer, a period in which McCain was absent from the air. For all that money, they maintain, the Democrat should be enjoying a comfortable lead. "If you spend the kind of money he's spending, you ought to get a better result," says state Senate Majority Leader Daniel Webster.

Democrats and even some Republicans, however, suggest that looking to past GOP victories may be misleading. Jeb Bush won both of his elections with the enthusiastic support of his party's conservative base -- a group that, until McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate, seemed less than thrilled with the nominee. (Bush's 2002 re-election opponent, moreover, was a Democratic neophyte who won a bitter, recount-marred primary over Janet Reno, the favorite of the party's South Florida liberal base.) Similarly, George W. Bush's 2004 re-election effort relied on a tremendous turnout of evangelical voters that nevertheless produced only a modest 5-point win.

Further, Crist's 7-point victory in 2006 followed an anti-tax, anti-Big Insurance populist campaign in which he struck a number of Democratic chords and avoided being linked to national Republicans. Over the White House's objections, Crist went so far as to skip an appearance with President Bush the day before the election. Even in much of Crist's campaign advertising, only the fine print identified him as a Republican. The nearly nonpartisan approach won Crist 18 percent of the black vote--a feat that is virtual impossible for McCain to replicate against Obama.

Referring to the television ad money that Obama spent over the summer, Schale argues that an accurate analysis must take into account where Obama began in the Florida polls after securing the nomination in June: trailing McCain by about 8 points. Those millions in ads allowed Obama -- who had avoided Florida during the primaries to honor the Democratic National Committee's sanctions against the state for scheduling its contest too early -- to introduce himself on his own terms. The strategy raised his poll numbers on a par with McCain's by the time of the Democratic convention in late August.

"What TV did was allow us to tell the story of Barack Obama," Schale says. "It brought the state into play." As for turning out unlikely voters, particularly the 600,000 registered African-Americans who did not vote in 2004, Obama supporters point out that such a feat has already been accomplished--in Florida, by Democrat Al Gore's campaign in 2000. Sparked by a voter-registration and turnout drive led by Rep. Kendrick Meek, then a state senator, Democrats boosted the number of black voters dramatically over the 1996 rate, giving Gore some 280,000 additional votes. Without this effort, Gore's Florida showing would not have warranted a single recount.

A final factor that could help Obama is that plenty of Crist's allies are annoyed that he was not chosen to be McCain's running mate, despite having endorsed the Arizonan in January and handing him a crucial state that otherwise would likely have gone to Mitt Romney.

Although the governor says he will do all he can to deliver Florida to McCain in November, many Crist loyalists remain dismayed that McCain opted for Palin, a nominee whose resume makes fellow first-term governor Crist's appear lengthy by comparison. One Crist backer says privately of the implications for the GOP: "We've given up the 'we're serious people' argument," adding that Palin will hurt McCain with independents, particularly in the independent-heavy I-4 corridor.

Publicly, Florida Republicans predict that political professionals will not let bruised egos and ambitions get in the way of keeping the White House in GOP hands, although privately some acknowledge that there may be a certain lack of enthusiasm.

Many Republicans, including some die-hard Crist supporters, say that McCain did what he had to do to win conservatives.

Meanwhile, with so much on the line, neither side wants to predict the size of its Florida victory. "I think it's definitely going to be a clash-of-the-titans year," says Brett Doster, a Republican strategist who ran President Bush's re-election operation in Florida four years ago but is not involved this year. "I really don't see a conclusive winner here until probably the last weekend."

Dan Gelber, the state House minority leader and Schale's former boss and mentor, agrees that it will be close, but he stresses that the Democratic operation is superior to the party's past efforts. "We were fighting a battle with 19th-century armaments," he said. "Now we have a real world-class operation. Now, all of a sudden, we are totally competitive."

So, with both sides playing all-out on the ground and over the airwaves, what will happen on November 4?

The answer will probably come from the Tampa Bay area. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win there was Bill Clinton in 1996, which was also the last time that a Democrat carried Florida. Gore lost Tampa Bay by 7,513 votes in 2000; Kerry lost it by 82,998 votes four years later.

"He or she who wins in Tampa Bay usually wins the state," Schale says.