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In a couple of hours, N.C. Veterans for McCain will be gathering at the Legislative Building for a rally. Later on, at 6:30, Barack Obama's campaign will open its Raleigh headquarters. We just posted a story online headlined: "State could be election battleground."

The latest Rasmussen Reports poll showed McCain with a 3 percent lead in N.C. Now, President Bush won North Carolina by more than 12 points in 2000 and 2004. You have to go back to Jimmy Carter in 1976 to find a Democrat who won North Carolina, and Carter, as a native Georgian, won most of the South.

So it has been a long time since North Carolina was, as they say, "in play." If you look at the electoral map on one of my favorite web sites, realclearpolitics.com, you will see that RCP lists it as a tossup.

According to RCP's calculations, Obama leads McCain -- when you count the "solid" and "leaning" states -- 255 electoral votes to 163, with 120 votes in "tossup" states like North Carolina. Essentially, that means that McCain needs to hold all the states that are solid or leaning to him, plus win most, if not all, of the 10 tossup states. If Obama picks off North Carolina's 15 electoral votes and holds the ones where he is leading, then he wins.

That means that McCain has very little margin for error. He can get to 270, but everything has to fall into place. Now a couple of caveats: This is a guy who made a near-miraculous comeback to win the nomination based on everything having fallen into place: The Giuliani and Thompson flameouts, the endurance of Huckabee that kept Mitt Romney off balance.

There is also the Doug Wilder phenomenon, named for the African-American politician who won the face for governor of Virginia in the 1989, but who didn't win by nearly as much as the polls said he would. I was an editor at the Norfolk newspaper, and I saw it up close. People don't always tell the pollsters the truth when an African-American is on the ballot, and so the polls may tend to reflect more support than is actually there. A more common name for this is the Bradley effect, named after the Los Angeles mayor, Tom Bradley, who lost a race for governor in 1982 despite polls showing him ahead.

There's considerable debate over whether this will happen this November. If it is present in a statistically significant way, then forget everything I have written here, because the polls will not be worth much. If that is the case, then a 1-point Obama lead in Virginia that has the Democrats ecstatic may actually mean he trails in the Old Dominion. Doug Wilder, I recall, had a 9-point lead in some polls going into Election Day over his Republican opponent J. Marshall Coleman, a moderate Mountain-Valley Republican who was not beloved by Richmond and Southside conservatives in the state GOP. Despite the lack of enthusiasm of many Republicans for their nominee, Wilder's 9-point lead was a mirage and he barely won. Now this election took place nearly 19 years ago, and, presumably, attitudes about race have changed in this country. And no sane Republican strategist would feel confident right now. But if McCain stays close in the tossup states, we'll see if the "Bradley-Wilder" effect is decisive.