GREELEY, COLO. — To learn how Barack Obama hopes to break Hillary Rodham Clinton's grip on the potentially crucial Latino vote on Super Tuesday, look beyond the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and New York, and follow the muddy path past Jose Perez's modest house here to the garage out back.
Until recently, the garage was littered with tools, and Perez kept his prized 1968 Chevy pickup inside. Now the truck sits out in the winter weather. The garage has become a bustling campaign headquarters, with computers, voter lists and precinct maps.
Obama's political strategists say places like Greeley and volunteers like Perez, 64, a bus driver, will play a key role in helping the Illinois senator win the Democratic presidential nomination.
On the surface, that may seem improbable. Greeley -- an isolated meat-packing and farming center on the high plains northeast of Denver -- has long been considered unpromising territory for Democratic presidential hopefuls. And Perez is such a political neophyte that when he tried to organize a march last year, he and four friends were the only ones to show up.
As if those weren't handicaps enough, some polls have shown Obama trailing Clinton among Latinos by a 3-to-1 margin. Many Latino voters have a deep-rooted relationship with the senator from New York and her husband. Clinton advisors are confident that this will serve her well Tuesday in states with large Latino populations, including California, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey.
Nonetheless, the Obama campaign has put substantial money and energy behind the idea that newly minted political activists like Perez -- working in places that are not a major focus for the Clinton campaign -- ultimately will yield a rich harvest of delegates.
Their bet: that they can take advantage of elaborate rules for the allocation of delegates. Rather than using a winner-take-all system, Democrats will award delegates to candidates in each Super Tuesday state according to the share of the vote they win.
That means that even in states where Clinton is on track to win the most votes, such as New York and New Jersey, Obama could emerge with a large share of delegates too. And in other states, the Obama camp hopes its strategy will boost it to an outright win in the statewide vote -- or, in the case of Colorado, to a win in the state's nominating caucuses.
