According to a Politico article published today, the Obama campaign is forging ahead with "an ambitious plan to reshape the American electorate in his favor." Deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand is quoted saying that bringing new voters into the process -- particularly African-Americans and those under 35 years old -- is "going to be a very big part of how we win."

The article goes on to highlight the Obama campaign's quiet voter registration efforts in primary state after primary state:

Obama's massive, smoothly integrated volunteer organization has been a mainstay of his campaign. [...]

His voter registration efforts have drawn far less attention. But they were there from the start. When Obama toured Iowa last February in his first campaign swing, his campaign brought along voter registration cards. As the race there heated up, voter registration became a quiet focus, with registration drives in colleges and even high schools that helped drive Obama's victory.

South Carolina, Hildebrand said, was the site of another intensive effort. "A great case study for voter registration was the South Carolina primary, where we dramatically expanded the African-American vote and dramatically expanded the youth vote," he said. "It was such a big part of getting us to that 28-point margin of victory."

Another high-stakes voter registration drive just concluded in Pennsylvania, where the deadline to register as a Democrat and participate in the primary was March 24. The Pennsylvania Department of State reports that more than 234,000 voters have either newly registered as Democrats or switched from other parties, and the state hasn't finished counting the new registrations.

In the coming days, the Clinton campaign is certain to highlight recent polls that show Hillary running stronger against McCain in the traditional battleground states of Florida and Ohio. This new data will surely revive their tired argument that she is better equipped to win in the general election because she polls better in these states.

But as we've noted before, this argument overlooks the ways in which Obama is poised to change the conventional electoral math this year. Indeed, state-by-state polling shows him putting a variety of states into play that Democrats have failed to contest in prior election years: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Virginia, South Carolina, and so on. This is very much a product of the dynamics highlighted in the Politico article; Obama is widening the Democrat electorate to include large swaths of black and twenty-something voters that the party has failed to fully tap in previous elections. And it's important to remember that by expanding the playing field into these states, he will force the GOP to divert resources out of the normal battleground states that Clinton is emphasizing, thus improving his chances there as well.