The Democrats have chosen Charlotte, North Carolina, to be the site of their 2012 convention. Obama barely won the state in 2008 — the vote margin was 14,000 votes — and there’s plenty of speculation that the choice indicates the Obama campaign thinks they can remain competitive in the usually red states that went blue in 2008.
Or Obama may think that having the convention there will definitively push the state over to his column. The 2008 Democrat convention was held in Denver, and Obama won decisively in Colorado, despite the fact that the state had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992.
The Republican convention will be in Tampa, Fla.