While polls make for fun tea leaves, we at Progress Illinois have been really interested in the ground game this election cycle. The media can bloviate all they want about vice presidential picks or which ads are most effective, but elections are usually won in the trenches, where activists drum up support for their candidates and turn people out to the polls. Barack Obama bought into this theory and organized his way past the Democratic front-runners in the primaries. This November, he might just do it again.

This weekend post by FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver illustrates Obama's advantage. Silver compiled a comprehensive estimate of the number of field offices each campaign presently has open in each state and Obama edges John McCain by a massive three-to-one margin: 336-101. The state-by-state analysis is even more shocking:

McCain, who has spent almost nothing on advertising in Florida, is instead very heavily invested on the ground there with 35 offices, perhaps reflecting the fact that Florida has one of the nation's best and most effective state Republican party operations. The other states where McCain has multiple offices open are: Michigan (11), Ohio (9), Minnesota (7), Missouri (7), Wisconsin (6), Virginia (6), Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (3). By contrast, the McCain campaign has just one office open in key states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and (somewhat shockingly) Pennsylvania, and no offices open in some second-tier swing states like Indiana and Montana.

How could the lack of campaign office play out in the Hoosier State, a state McCain says he is confident he can carry? While his campaign told the Tribune it "will intensify its efforts in the coming weeks," they will also rely exclusively on existing Republican Party county offices to launch voter registration and GOTV operations -- a strategy that leaves Silver skeptical.

Some fairly substantial degree of coordination between the national campaign and the state party apparatuses is inevitable in any Presidential campaign. But in Obama's case, it is Chicago that is driving the bus (to the extent that we'll probably begin to hear some complaints from local party officials), whereas the McCain campaign is effectively competing for resources and attention with other Republican candidates.