The Republican primary candidates have cleared out of New Hampshire, but Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is just heating up.

A few dozen Democrats sat on folding chairs spread across the floor of a spacious room within a former factory building on Brewery Lane in Portsmouth. It was the evening of Jan. 24, and blue 2012 flyers surrounded a large projection screen where a timer ticked down the minutes to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

The room serves as the local headquarters of Obama’s reelection campaign. As guests waited for the annual address to begin, field organizer Bay Scoggin took questions from the crowd and encouraged them to take part in grassroots campaign efforts in New Hampshire.

“We in this room need to be the people that push our message forward,” Scoggin said. “Get involved. Come volunteer in the campaign. Come meet with me. We have a lot of fun in this office. We do a lot of amazing work. Any questions that you have, we are constantly answering those questions.”

Scoggin’s call to action came as Obama supporters across the state were gearing up for what promises to be a challenging reelection bid in November. Republican presidential candidates who paraded through the state for more than a year in anticipation of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary have closed their local offices and cleared out, moving on to contests in South Carolina and Florida. But “Obama for America” offices have popped up in at least seven communities around the state and will remain open through the general election nine months from now.

For Democrats, this is a strategic time for building momentum. While Republican frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich continue to slug it out in televised debates, Democrats are unified in their support of Obama, and they’re already focused on spreading his message to the masses.  
Although New Hampshire carries only four electoral votes out of 538, it is a key battleground state that could go either way. Democrat John Kerry won here in 2004, and Obama took New Hampshire in ’08. But 2010 saw a deluge of Republican victories for state and federal offices, and a number of polls conducted late last year had Romney hypothetically beating Obama if he wins the nomination.

One of Obama’s biggest challenges will be convincing the public that the economy is headed in the right direction. As the year began, the national unemployment rate was still at 8.5 percent. Obama and his supporters are emphasizing that, while the recovery has been slow, the economy has steadily improved. As Obama pointed out in his address, the nation has added jobs in each of the last 22 months.

“The president has made clear that we still need to do more... But under his leadership, the economy is growing again,” said Holly Shulman, New Hampshire spokesperson for the Obama campaign.

Shulman says the campaign has held hundreds of events across the state since last April. Among them were several “watch parties” for the State of the Union address last week, including the one in Portsmouth, which included former House Speaker Terie Norelli and Portsmouth Democratic Committee chair Larry Drake, each of whom later issued statements praising the president’s speech.

“Tonight we heard a very clear vision from the president about moving our state and nation forward through a focus on manufacturing jobs and investment in education,” Norelli said. “It is clear that job creation is our number one priority, and these are the kinds of concrete ideas our nation needs.”

Also in attendance at the Portsmouth watch party was Lenore Patton, chair of the Rockingham County Democratic Committee. She’s been actively working on various Democratic causes for more than 40 years, and she commended the strong organization behind Obama’s reelection campaign in New Hampshire.

“This is the most organized, best campaign I’ve ever worked with,” Patton said. “I’ve been working in politics since 1970 and worked on a lot of presidential campaigns, and I’ve never seen one that was so ground-up, that was really such a grassroots campaign and yet was so organized. It’s exciting.”

Patton and her husband Gary have spent hours making phone calls on behalf of Obama’s campaign, and they wear their “Obama 2012” buttons everywhere they go. Gary Patton carries with him a list of Obama’s accomplishments over the last three years, and he pulls it out whenever someone questions the president’s record. They’ve referred to the list when talking to both conservatives who think Obama has gone too far and progressives who think he hasn’t gone far enough.

Some Democrats have disseminated a fact sheet from Think Progressive highlighting the key points of Obama’s campaign. Several of those points echo information trumpeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement, such as the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans take home 24 percent of the nation’s income and own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80 percent owns just 7 percent of the wealth.

Obama’s supporters stress that while he is looking out for the middle class, Republicans are only interested in protecting the nation’s wealthiest citizens, a notion they say is evident in Congressional Republicans’ resistance to a payroll tax cut.

Democrats accuse GOP presidential candidates of promoting the very same policies that led to the nation’s economic and financial collapse under George W. Bush, such as deregulating Wall Street and providing tax cuts to the rich.

“I think the choice in this election will be clear between the president, who has focused on strengthening the middle class and moving the country forward, and the Republican, who advocates returning to the failed policies of the past,” Shulman said.

Although he did not directly reference any Republican candidate, Obama seemed to draw that same distinction during his State of the Union address, during which he focused largely on income inequality. He also touted his record on jobs, taking credit for the restoration of the auto industry and noting that the nation has added more than 3 million private-sector jobs over the last 22 months.

Vice President Joe Biden repeated that statistic during a visit to Rochester two days after Obama’s address. Biden spoke to an audience at Albany Engineering Composites, which is partnering with Safran USA and Great Bay Community College on a job training program. Safran is in the process of constructing a facility in Rochester that will bring 400 new jobs to the city. Biden called the project “a perfect example of how to bring manufacturing back to America and keep it here.”

Biden used his visit to reiterate several of the points Obama made during his address, during which he promoted partnerships between manufacturing companies and community colleges and spoke against tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs overseas. That the vice president chose a New Hampshire site to illustrate Obama’s plans underscores the Democratic Party’s commitment to campaigning here.

Biden is no stranger to the state, as he campaigned heavily in New Hampshire when he was running against Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

“If I’d known how good Obama was, I just would have joined the campaign earlier. I wouldn’t have come up here and tried to get your votes,” he joked.

The vice president wasn’t the first high-profile member of Obama’s team to make a stop in New Hampshire during the current reelection cycle. David Axelrod, one of the president’s top strategists, spoke with supporters at Jumpin’ Jay’s Fish Cafe in Portsmouth last fall and urged them to be optimistic.

“People say to me, ‘You ran on hope and change before. What are you running on now?’ Hope and change. Hope and change,” Axelrod said during the visit. “The fact is, change is hard and it takes time, but the point is to keep going.”

Obama has his work cut out for him. A Granite State Poll conducted by the UNH Survey Center last November asked New Hampshire voters to choose between Obama and potential Republican nominees. The poll indicated Romney would narrowly defeat Obama, 47 percent to 44 percent, if he is the nominee.

But, as the incumbent, Obama has a number of inherent advantages, including unlimited media access, ample funding and a head start on the Republicans still fighting for their party’s nomination. While volunteers make phone calls and knock on doors in New Hampshire, Obama for America is also launching a viral marketing campaign with online advertisements and social media outreach.

“The Obama campaign is reaching out to voters online and offline in New Hampshire,” Shulman said.

The campaign recently unveiled a significant digital ad in several key states, including New Hampshire. The 15-second ad hypes the president’s record on job growth with a graph illustrating the nation’s economic recovery since he took office.

“The digital buy is geographically focused in key states,” a campaign official said. “It is not limited to any specific type of site, but will include local and national news sites.”

The ad also features a “sharing tool” that allows supporters to send a physical postcard of the graph to up to five people.

The New Hampshire Democratic Party will piggyback Obama’s reelection campaign with numerous local races. All 400 seats in the state House of Representatives will be up for grabs in November, along with all 24 state Senate seats. Republicans currently have veto-proof majorities in both chambers at the State House.

Also up for grabs are the governor’s seat (Democratic Gov. John Lynch is not running for reelection) and both of New Hampshire’s Congressional seats, which are currently occupied by Republicans Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass.

Party chair Ray Buckley compared the Republican presidential candidates to the GOP leadership in New Hampshire. He said recent contentious primary debates have revealed a Republican field that is out of touch with voters.

“It’s so reminiscent of what we’ve witnessed in the New Hampshire House with (Speaker) Bill O’Brien and his extremist agenda at the State House,” said Buckley, who spoke by phone from Washington, D.C., where he attended the State of the Union address. “The agenda that the Republicans have pushed through here in New Hampshire is so out of the mainstream that we’re looking forward to November 2012 very much.”

At the state and national level, Democrats must attempt to replicate the electric atmosphere that surrounded Obama’s ’08 campaign. His biggest obstacle may be overcoming apathy among voters who supported him last time around but no longer feel so motivated to hit the polls.

Lenore Patton said the energy has been high in the early days of Obama’s reelection bid. She’s been encouraged to meet many other Obama supporters who see her 2012 campaign button and approach her.

“It’s just good to see other people are doing it, too,” she said. “By wearing these, we’re sending a message to people: You’re not alone. We’re glad that you are supporting Obama. We’re supporting Obama. There are a lot of us here.”