SUFFOLK, VA. - The solid South could be cracking beneath John McCain's feet.
Southern support for Barack Obama is building in states that have been reliably Republican for decades, polls show, and they might deliver a decisive verdict in next week's election.
Virginia hasn't gone Democratic for president in 44 years, but it is leaning Obama's way. He holds a narrower edge in other Southern battlegrounds: North Carolina, last carried by a Democrat in 1976, and Florida, which decided the 2000 race.
"The loss of a single one of those states would make it virtually impossible for McCain to win," says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.
McCain has sought to exploit the region's cultural divisions, putting himself squarely on the side of older forces that have held sway for decades.
A new McCain radio ad, now airing in the South, portrays Obama as out of step with "our America." A top McCain adviser provoked angry reactions when she claimed recently that Obama was losing the "real Virginia," those parts of the state beyond the Washington, D.C., area.
The latest poll numbers suggest a different reality: Voter trends are catching up with wider changes that have been under way for a long time in the old Confederacy.
"These are not old-timey rural states anymore. These are muscular metropolitan states," says Ferrel Guillory, director of the University of North Carolina's Program on Public Life.
The thriving bedroom communities of North Carolina's Research Triangle, Florida's I-4 corridor and Northern Virginia's high-tech suburbs are increasingly where Southerners live, and many of them are open to Obama's message.
"They may be fiscally conservative and live in mostly white neighborhoods," said Guillory, "but there is a sense that Obama represents, to them, a kind of turning of the page after George Bush."
Obama is avoiding states McCain will likely carry, such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Instead, the Democrat is targeting the region's fastest-growing states, especially Virginia and North Carolina, where expanding economies have lured thousands of new residents, black and white, including those from outside the South.
Obama has gone deep into rural areas, hoping to chip away at McCain's big advantage among culturally conservative whites.
But Obama's greatest emphasis has been on the suburbs, including the rapidly growing outer suburbs that Republicans dominated in recent presidential contests.
