Obama tries to exorcise Democratic demons in Fla.

By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff

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 was able to spend.

He spread an army of 500 volunteers across every corner of the state, including the rural and heavily conservative panhandle, hoping to drive down the typically huge margins for Republicans, even if he couldn’t win them outright.

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, particularly in the ‘‘I-4 corridor,’’ the vast area between Tampa and Orlando that statewide candidates need to capture the Sunshine State.

Tonight, early returns suggested that his efforts paid off.

‘‘We are out there,’’ said Aldo Castillo, a 46-year-old unemployed architect who spent part of today helping turn out the Hispanic vote for Obama, and ‘‘we are voting,’’ he said.

The preliminary tally suggested Obama had done better in the I-4 corridor than Senator John Kerry had four years ago, said Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa — particularly in Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, as well as Orange and Osceola counties. Results had not yet come in for Hillsborough County, which saw ‘‘massive amounts of early voting and a very high African-American turnout,’’ McManus said. If the trends continue, she said, Obama would win Florida.

‘‘It’ll be a squeaker,’’ she said.

Obama never wanted to bet too much on Florida, though, so he hedged his bets, using his enormous financial advantage to replicate a similar strategy in other states.

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.

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

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

McCain’s path to victory, 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.

And McCain built a loyal core of supporters in Florida. Jack Tew, a 56-year-old Republican and small business owner from Riverview, southeast of Tampa, who was out holding a McCain sign in Tampa today, said he was confident McCain would win Florida precisely because voters here respected his record of sacrifice and action. ‘‘To me, a true American will sacrifice for his country. McCain, he’s done that,’’ he said.

But as election day neared, economic troubles caused many voters to be wary of McCain. Julie Smith, disabled from a serious car accident eight years agosaid she once voted Republican,but today cast her ballot for Obama. She worried McCain would continue the policies of the Bush administration, which she said had cut off her Medicaid.

‘‘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, a 22-year-old 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.

Turnout was especially strong in Florida’s African-American precincts today. When she cast her vote for Obama at the Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in a middle-class, largely African-American section of St. Petersburg, Tamika Ruffin, a 29-year-old third grade teacher, was thinking of her brother, who she said floundered in school and work and was just beginning to get his life in order when he died young of an unexpected heart problem. ‘‘He’s going to give young black men and boys some self-esteem and hope,’’ she said. ‘‘That word is now out of their vocabulary.’’

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.’’