RICHMOND--It might be easy for Virginians to forget there's a presidential election going on.
After all, neither President George Bush nor his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, is advertising in the commonwealth. Both are pouring money instead into battleground states where the outcome is in question.
A Bush rally in Northern Virginia, just a short trip from the White House, more than a month ago is the last time either one of them set foot in the Old Dominion.
Kerry's campaign pulled all but a handful of staffers out of the state a couple of weeks ago. Virginia, which hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, simply isn't high on either campaign's list of priorities.
But the race in Virginia might be tighter than it appears.
An Oct. 6 Zogby poll put Bush at 50 percent in Virginia, Kerry at 47 percent. An earlier Mason-Dixon poll had Bush leading by six points.
Even a six-point lead is too close for comfort, and Republicans say the last thing they want is for Bush voters to get complacent and stay home on Election Day.
"A lot of people are very, very worried that Bush isn't going to win Virginia," said Jay Hughes, a Spotsylvania County resident and leader of the Young Republicans in Virginia. "That's a sure sign that we need to get busy.. There's nothing like a little fire under your butt to get [people motivated]."
To that end, local party units have been organizing get-out-the-vote efforts. At the national level, Republicans coordinated a slew of rallies, phone banks and literature drops on Oct. 9, and planned a door-to-door campaign this weekend.
"We're not going to take one single, solitary vote for granted," Hughes said. "Ultimately I do believe President Bush is going to win Virginia."
Shaun Kenney, chairman of the Spotsylvania Republican Committee, thinks so, too. He doubts the race in Virginia is as tight as the Zogby poll suggests, and bases that partly on the enthusiasm of grassroots Republicans in his county.
But both polls show a race that's too close for complacency, he said.
"If it were 10 percent, then we'd get complacent. But hearing numbers like 6 and 3 percent just fires us up to go out and do the job we need to do," Kenney said.
Fredericksburg Republican Committee Chairman Matthew Hoell said the decision by the Kerry campaign to pull most of its staff out of Virginia shows "that the job we were doing was enough that he knows he can't win Virginia."
Hoell said the Fredericksburg committee has a lot of volunteers going door-to-door, providing yard signs, passing out literature and making phone calls.
It's not enough to encourage people to vote for Bush, Hoell said. Getting them to actually go to the polls is more important.
"Turnout is always key to any election, [especially] one this close," Hoell said. "Getting complacent is exactly how you're going to get blindsided."
Kenney said one indication of enthusiasm is that he hasn't been able to keep Bush yard signs in stock.
At one point, he got a shipment of a couple of hundred signs on a Friday. Local Republicans held a rally on Saturday. By Sunday, every sign was gone.
"Those are all long gone by now. Terrible demand for them. We get them in and they disappear," Kenney said.
But because Virginia is not a battleground state, those signs aren't coming from the national Bush campaign. The state party and local party committees are paying for them themselves.
"Every Bush sign you see is bought and paid for by local Republicans," Kenney said.
Kenney said Spotsylvania Republicans just got a shipment of 2,000 signs, and Stafford County got 1,000. Some of those will go to surrounding counties, such as Caroline. Kenney estimated that local Republicans have bought about 4,000 signs up to this point.
Hughes said the fact that Virginia hasn't gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Johnson is also helping fire up grass-roots volunteers.
"There's almost a 'not on my watch' mentality," he said.
Hoell agreed.
"We all see it as a Republican state and we definitely don't want to allow the state to go to John Kerry," he said.
To reach CHELYEN DAVIS: 804/782-9362 cdavis@freelancestar.com