Obama focused intently, spent heavily to woo Fla.

Betty and David Alcantara and Alice Ventra studied sample ballots while they waited to cast their votes at a municipal center in Pembroke Pines, Fla. yesterday. (Gina Fontana/ South Florida Sun-Sentinel/ AP)

TAMPA - Barack Obama badly wanted to defeat John McCain in the state that devastated Democrats eight years ago.

He spent some $36 million on television advertising campaign in Florida, almost three times what McCain and his party spent. He spread an army of 500 staff members across the state.

And he set up vast registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts to bring out new voters on college campuses and in the African-American and Hispanic communities.

Obama's efforts paid off. Florida was placed in the Obama win column last night, part of the final tally that put him over the top in electoral votes - and sent him to the White House.

The strategy that won Florida was also successful for Obama in other states, helping him reshape the electoral map in the Democrats' favor. Obama extended Democratic control across the country - to Virginia in the South, to Ohio in the Midwest, while further securing the West.

Exit polls also suggested that, in Florida and elsewhere, Obama trounced McCain among Hispanics. "We are out there," said Aldo Castillo, 46, an unemployed architect who spent part of yesterday helping turn out Florida's Hispanic vote for Obama, and "we are voting," he said.

Obama did better in Florida's mid-state "I-4" corridor, named for the highway that stretches from Tampa to Daytona Beach, than Senator John Kerry had four years ago, said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "The Obama campaign very, very strategically from day one put a lot of time and effort and money and people into winning that highway - their efforts paid off, obviously," MacManus said. Obama did particularly well with Hispanic voters in Osceola county, she added, "and they did very well with young voters and African Americans. That's their three targets and they hit them right on," she said.

But Obama had never been willing to bet it all on Florida or Ohio, where he waged a similarly aggressive and successful campaign; he worked to devise alternate paths that would also lead to the White House.

He looked to Virginia, which last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, but whose fast-growing suburbs outside Washington, D.C. have dramatically changed the political make-up of the state in the last eight years. Yesterday his victories in the northern suburban counties of Prince William and Loudoun helped seal a close race there.

He looked west, to Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, states with churning populations and an independent streak.

And he looked to rural areas of red states such as Indiana and Georgia, setting up organizations that forced McCain to spread his smaller war chest thin.

McCain, from the start, had fewer possibilities. Saddled with an enormously unpopular Republican incumbent, a sour economy and an electorate deeply worried about the country's place in the world, his best option in the last months of the race appeared to be to win states such as New Hampshire, where he emerged victorious as the underdog candidate in two successive Republican primaries, or Pennsylvania, where working-class whites had overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton's presidency in the primary election.

McCain had built a core of supporters in Florida, but as election day neared, economic troubles made many voters wary of McCain.

Julie Smith, disabled from a car accident eight years ago, said she once voted Republican, but yesterday cast her ballot for Obama. She worried McCain would continue the policies of the Bush administration, which she said had cut off her Medicaid. That was a risk, she said, that she could not afford to take.

"Other people have it worse, they've lost their homes," she said, dissolving into tears in the parking lot of the south Tampa church where she cast her vote just before the polls closed last night. "This country is sick. It needs somebody like Obama. I think he really cares."

Matt Rodriguez, 22, a customer service representative for Publix supermarket in Tampa, didn't bother voting in 2004, but this year, he made sure to get to the polls and to cast a vote for Obama. "I've got a lot of friends in the military over there [in Iraq] who want to come back home," he said.

They were the kind of voters who gave Obama victories in key battleground states nationwide. In Florida, as elsewhere, turnout was especially strong in many African-American precincts yesterday. Tamika Ruffin, 29, a third grade teacher, said she was thinking of her brother as she cast her vote for Obama at the Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in a middle-class section of St. Petersburg. "He's going to give young black men and boys some self-esteem and hope," she said.

Stacey Naroditsky, a 21-year-old student and preschool teacher from south Tampa, smiled as she walked out into the dark parking lot of the church where she voted last night. "I hope I can be part of something that can change the world."

Lisa Wangsness can be reached at wangsness@globe.com.