What if the presidential election ended up being decided in…Virginia? With more than seven million people, the state counts for thirteen votes at the Electoral College. If results are tight elsewhere, Virginia could be the game-changer.

The problem for Obama is that Virginia has not voted for a Democratic president for over fourty years. The last time was when Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964. This is clearly Republican country.

And what better place than the annual state fair to get a feeling of how the state may vote this year? The fair is held in Richmond, the gateway to the rural south of the US and the confederate capital during the civil war. Many people, adults and children, wear confederate flags on their shirts, on their hats. Some even have it tattooed. The main attraction is the ever-popular pig race.

Jim Roberts is an electrician. He says McCain will stand up for the middle class and protect important traditions like the right to bear arms. "It's important to have the right to protect your family, be it with the right to bear arms or any other way," he says.

But this is only one aspect of Virginia. The state also borders, to the north, the federal capital Washington DC. And this is where most of the population growth happens.

"There's a lots of northerners, people from New York, New England, it's changing the character of the state", says Robert Lang, president of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech and an expert in population changes. Northern Virginia, he explains, has basically become a suburb of Washington. People who come for well-paid qualified jobs in the capital often end up moving to Virginia.

And these people vote Democrat. "We know it because we had a Senate race and a governor race recently, and we saw then that the Democrats were much stronger than anybody had realized", says Lang.

In the streets of Alexandria, so close to Washington that it is actually accessible by metro, Boyd Walker is on a mission for the Obama campaign. After recruiting new voters on the streets, he is bringing their registrations himself to city hall. "Bush won against Kerry in Virginia by 260,000 people. We've already registered 270,000 new voters, mainly in Democratic areas", he says. This year Democrats hope they can register enough new supporters to turn Virginia blue.

And that now seems within reach. Because of the changes in the state's population, but also because of the financial turmoil. Walker is a small business owner. And he votes for Obama, he says, because it makes business sense. Now with the economy becoming issue number one, he thinks the Democrats will have a clear shot at Virginia and at the presidency.

"Under Clinton, we had economic growth. Under Bush the economy shrank. I think the people will trust the Democrats to fix the economy", says Walker. Like in the rest of the country, the financial turmoil has put Obama ahead in the polls in Virginia.