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It is noon hour in the Pit, an outdoor courtyard at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where students gather for lunch, which explains the tables manned by earnest young men and women promoting breast-cancer awareness, relief for the victims of Darfur, and the upcoming drag queen show.

But the most prominent table by far is hosted by people wearing Barack Obama T-shirts and holding up signs: Register to Vote. A huddle of students is doing just that, frowning over the clip boards as they fill out the forms.

Lucy Emerson, 18, will be casting a ballot for the first time. She plans to support the Democratic presidential nominee. “Things need to change, and I think Obama can do something,” she says.

The Obama campaign on campus is ubiquitous, she reports. “There are signs everywhere, there are speakers who are always coming for Obama rallies. I haven't seen anything from [Republican presidential nominee John] McCain.”

Ms. Emerson is the latest to join a growing army of new voters who could shape the outcome of the presidential election, by transforming America's electoral map.

In numbers never seen before, people are registering to vote on Nov. 4. By overwhelming margins, these new voters are planning to vote Democrat.

Today is the voter registration deadline in North Carolina, a state that has been safely Republican in recent history, but where Mr. Obama is essentially tied with Mr. McCain in recent polls.

As of last week, six hundred thousand new voters had been added to the six million names on the state's voters' list. Half of them have registered as Democrats, a fifth as Republicans, with the rest unaffiliated.

A third of the newly registered voters in North Carolina are African American and a third of them are under 24, natural Obama supporters. The phenomenon is replicating itself across the nation. In the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, the number of registered Democrats has increased by 13 per cent this year, while the number of registered Republicans has declined by 1 per cent.

USA Today surveyed voter registration in eight battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. It concluded that, overall, Democrats had added 800,000 voters to their rolls, and Republicans had lost 300,000.

What's happening? Synergy. Many young voters and many African American voters are attracted to Mr. Obama's mantra of hope and change, and by the fact that he could be the first African American president of the United States. But both groups notoriously vote beneath their demographic weight. To capture their ballot, the Obama campaign launched a 50-state voter registration drive, first during the primaries against opponent Hillary Clinton, and then switching in June to confronting John McCain. The campaign matched sophisticated voter tracking technology to a legion of committed, on-the-ground volunteers.

Consider the microcosm of UNC at Chapel Hill. Vivek Chilukuri heads up the campus campaign to register voters. He has about 150 volunteers helping him. He has volunteers in every dorm on campus, who know the name, room number, registration status and voting intention of every student in their dorm. It's their job to work on the undecided voters, and to get every possible supporter to the polling booth, preferably to the on-campus advance poll that will be open between Oct. 16 and Nov. 1.

An increasing number of states are allowing advance polling over a protracted period. This is good for Mr. Obama because it reduces the danger of new voters giving up when confronted by long lines at polling stations on voting day.

Another core constituency in the registration drive is the African American community. While they support Mr. Obama almost to a woman and man, getting them to register and then getting them to the polls is a great challenge.

So here, in a health clinic in southeast Raleigh, where most of the patients are African American, a solitary volunteer canvases people arriving and leaving to see if they have registered to vote. In half an hour, half a dozen sign up.

For more than a generation, North Carolina has been a safe Republican state. In 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry 56 per cent to 43 per cent.

But there is a cultural sea change under way in the state. North Carolina is one of the fastest-growing states in the union. Its population is projected to increase 50 per cent by 2030, taking it from the 10th largest state to the 7th. New arrivals are attracted to thriving (well, until a month ago) technology and banking sectors. It is also a popular destination for migrating retirees and for Latinos in search of a new start.

These arrivistes dilute the entrenched cultural assumptions – black versus white, urban versus rural – that have afflicted the politics of the Old South for so many generations.

Ty Harrell is a young, black state Representative who defeated the Republican incumbent in 2006 in a district that is 90 per cent white. White, but with one of the highest concentrations of PhDs per capita in the nation. (UNC at Chapel Hill is only one of several universities in the region.)

In the city of Cary, which Mr. Harrell represents, “the faces are changing, the sounds changing, the language is changing,” as he describes it.

“The people moving here look at the people who have been here all of their lives and they're saying: ‘This isn't how we do it in New York, or New Jersey, or Rhode Island or Oregon.' ” But because they're new arrivals, divorced from their new home's complex political culture, many of them don't bother to vote. They, Mr. Harrell believes, are the third tranche of Mr. Obama's voter registration drive, because they generally come from Democratic states. “Because of the growth, we have to get those people registered,” he says. “And then we have to turn those people who are registered into voters, and appeal to them in a way they haven't been appealed to before.”

If Mr. Obama can succeed in turning the millennials – those who came of age about or after 2000 – into active voters, if he can galvanize black voters to come to the polls as never before, and if he can get those flooding into the southern states to engage in its politics, then he could effect a transformation of the South not seen since the Republicans replaced the Democrats in the 1970s and '80s as the natural governing party from Arizona to Georgia.

To which the Republicans reply: We'll believe it when we see it. In next-door South Carolina, which is expected to remain Republican, GOP organizers scoffed at the Democrats' fevered efforts to sign up new voters. “There's no guarantee that the voters who come out and register are going to vote Democratic,” GOP spokesman Rob Godfrey told one newspaper.

Perhaps. But back at the Pit, after lunch hour has ended, and the Darfur table is empty, and they're packing up the breast-cancer awareness display, students still cluster around the voter registration table. And their numbers are growing.