be held in Charlotte next year, and Obama is traveling to Durham on Monday to make a jobs pitch and raise his profile. In 2008, Obama galvanized voters en route to his closest state victory. He beat John McCain by a mere 14,177 in North Carolina. Interviews last week in the state, which has the 10th highest unemployment rate in the country, revealed widespread economic anxiety among voters. "I don't think that enthusiasm is quite as broad as it was," said Shirley Tate, a 66-year-old retired teacher and reading specialist from Gibsonville. She knocked on doors and made phone calls for Obama's campaign three years ago. "We'll have to work two times harder than we did the last time," she said, as she watched for visitors at the gift shop of Greensboro's International Civil Rights Center and Museum where she now works. Obama does have advantages here that past Democratic presidential candidates did not. More than 21 percent of the state's population is African-American. The state's Hispanic population is on the rise, a fact not lost on Obama advisers as he mobilizes support for overhauling immigration laws. What's more, the state's partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans has softened with an increase in unaffiliated voters. Like Virginia, Florida and Georgia, three other southern states that Obama wants in play in 2012, North Carolina has seen huge population growth in the past 25 years. Most of that growth has been concentrated in metropolitan areas where finance, pharmaceuticals and high tech have replaced old industries such as tobacco and textiles. Some rural areas are hurting under the weight of unemployment that ranges from 12 percent to more than 15 percent. Major corporations such as IBM, Bayer, and DuPont have a home in North Carolina's Research Triangle in the heart of the academic triad of Duke University, North Carolina State and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. High technology is leaving its imprint elsewhere in the state, too. Apple has invested $500 million toward a $1 billion data center in rural Maiden to handle its new iCloud storage and retrieval service. Those demographic and economic changes have made states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida more competitive for Democrats. Nevertheless, Obama still faces a huge challenge motivating voters again like he did in 2008. Tom Hedrick, a 52-year-old engineer from Lexington said Obama and his advisers have been overly optimistic about his job creation plans. A McCain supporter in 2008, he's looking at the Republican field for a candidate in 2012. "Three, four months ago they were talking about how it felt like the recession was over and we were pulling out of it," he said as he tasted a cheese dip at a farmers' market about 30 miles from his home. "It's just not happening." As they do elsewhere in the country, people in North Carolina measure the economy through their own personal indicators. While all express anxiety, some see spring-like signs of rejuvenation while others find little cause for optimism. At a busy library in Cary, a fast-growing suburb of Raleigh, branch manager Liz Bartlett said that when the recession was at its worst she noticed more residents using the library instead of buying books and using library computers instead of their own. "It's gotten better over the last two years," she said. "With libraries, we