CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The choice of location for any political convention speaks volumes about election-year strategy, and the goal for Democrats in choosing North Carolina was, put simply, to stay on offense – expanding President Barack Obama’s path to a second term and building a permanent foothold in a southern state.

The battleground for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House in November encompasses a number of states but, for Obama, winning here in November might mean putting the presidency out of reach for Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

“If Romney doesn't win North Carolina, he's not going to be the president,” said Dallas Woodhouse, the state director for Americans for Prosperity, the economically conservative group associated with billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch.

The president won the Tar Heel State in 2008, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Obama only won by 14,000 votes – a relatively thin margin out of 2.2 million total ballots cast – stressing the extent to which North Carolina still seems like more natural turf for Republicans in a presidential election.

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The 2008 election saw unprecedented voter turnout among African-Americans and students in the state’s “Research Triangle,” a geographic cluster in the northern part of North Carolina, anchored by several major universities. Part of the question in 2012 is whether Obama can recapture the enthusiasm of four years ago.

“We know that it’s going to be close, and it was last time,” said an Obama campaign official in North Carolina, who asked to speak on background in order to offer a better assessment of the race.

The most recent polling showed the race here close, with Romney holding a four-point lead in the latest Elon University/Charlotte Observer poll published Monday.

As with Romney last week in Tampa, where Republicans had hoped their convention would have a pronounced and positive effect on voters in Florida, Democrats are looking to leave Charlotte in better shape for the fall.

Making matters more difficult for Obama are troubles within the state's Democratic Party. Allegations of sexual harassment against a state party official, a struggling economy, and Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s somewhat surprising decision against seeking a second term are among the factors that worsen matters for Democrats here. But Perdue was also far from popular, and her decision against seeking a second term arguably cleaned the slate for state Democrats.

“Voters are voting on the president and his record and Mitt Romney and his lack of a record,” the Obama official argued. “So the state party has had no impact on our organization.”

This state is nonetheless battleground turf. North Carolina is among the nine “toss up” states on the NBC News battleground map. The state ranks fourth in total ad spending, according to NBC’s ad-tracking sources, underscoring how competitive the battle for this state’s 15 electoral votes has become.

The Obama campaign and its supporters have spent $22 million in North Carolina so far this cycle, versus $34 million by the Romney campaign and outside groups and super PACs who back the Republican presidential candidate.

That number is only likely to grow thanks to additional advertising dollars being sent into the state to turn voters out to the polls, not just on Election Day, but during early voting periods, as well.

The turnout operation is especially important given the need for Obama to replicate the voter numbers that helped put him over the top in 2008.

“He had a level of excitement that was unprecedented, and I don't see it this time,” said Woodhouse. “When you only win by 14,000 votes, it only takes a small loss of enthusiasm for things to go the other way.”

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Putting the Democratic National Convention here in Charlotte is, in no small part, an effort to recapture and harness those passions from 2008, especially in North Carolina. George W. Bush actually won Mecklenburg County – home to Charlotte – in 2000, and Republicans won the Raleigh area from 1996 through 2004. Obama won those areas decisively in 2008, and he drove up his numbers with good turnout in Fayetteville and surrounding areas to the south.

The Obama campaign boasts of having an organizational advantage associated with keeping an "Organizing for America" office open in North Carolina for the span of the president’s first term, and they claim to have gotten a good response to a volunteering initiative that distributed tickets to the president’s speech on the final night of the convention.

And convention organizers are hopeful that they can use this week’s festivities – including Monday’s “Carolinafest,” an event open to the public featuring entertainers like James Taylor, and Thursday’s stadium acceptance speech by Obama – to both recruit volunteers and win over voters.

Mladen Antonov / AFP - Getty Images

Paintings of President Barack Obama are for sale at a street fair in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 3, 2012.

One convention planner argued that history shows a mixed record for candidates and the site of their conventions; the Obama team believes how they use their convention is just as important as where they place it.

"Where you plop down your convention really doesn't matter, unless you use it wisely,” said the convention planner.

Winning North Carolina – or even staying competitive here – would bode well for the president’s bid for a second term. Obama doesn’t need to win the state, and has plenty of other paths to victory without it. Romney’s math, his ability to secure the 270 necessary electoral votes to win the White House, would be far more difficult without North Carolina. The mere fact that North Carolina is even in the list of competitive states demonstrates the advantages Obama has and the hurdles Romney faces.

Moreover, if Obama is even threatening victory here by Election Day, it will have meant that Romney was forced to spend resources on winning a state President George W. Bush won easily in 2004 despite then-North Carolina Sen. John Edwards being on the Democratic ticket.

Chris Keane / Reuters

Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney speaks to supporters in Charlotte, North Carolina April 18, 2012.

CHARLOTTE, NC -- Mitt Romney delivered a blistering attack on President Obama's economic record just footsteps from the site where the president will accept his re-election nomination this summer.

On a rooftop a few hundred yards away from the Bank of America stadium, Romney offered his own alternative version of what North Carolinians could expect to hear from the president in his acceptance speech, as well as what they would not.

"What you won’t hear at that convention is that for the last 38 months, unemployment has been above 8 percent, that we’ve had 24 million Americans that are out of work, stopped looking for work, or underemployed," Romney said.

"You won’t hear that, since he gave that speech and became president, that there have been 50,000 more job losses here in North Carolina, more than twice as many as would fit in that stadium," Romney continued, referring to the nearby stadium, the home of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, where the president will speak on the final night of the Democratic convention.

The empty stadium was meant to serve as the backdrop for Romney's speech today -- a visual bracketing of the president -- but was ultimately thwarted by rain that forced the remarks indoors.

Romney focused not just on Obama's planned 2012 convention speech, but also his 2008 remarks, reading aloud from a portion at one point and substituting then nominee-Obama's rebuke of the Bush economy, with his own criticism for the Obama economy, urging the president to take ownership of the economy.

"He can’t continue to try and deflect blame elsewhere," Romney said. "At some point he’s got to acknowledge this is his economy –- that what’s happened is the result of his policies –- not of his predecessors, not of Congress."

He even cracked a joke at the expense of the optics of Obama's acceptance speech, in which the president stood amidst towering Greek columns on the floor of Denver's Invesco field.

"You're not going to see President Obama standing alongside Greek columns. He's not going to want to remind anybody of Greece," Romney said.

The former Massachusetts governor also said the economy may yet improve before Election Day, but that the president would deserve no credit if it did so.

"Upon being elected president he said if we let him borrow $787 billion he would hold unemployment below eight percent, and it has not been below eight percent since," Romney said. "Now its going to get below 8 percent someday. Our economy always come back, comes back -- but it's no thanks to the policies of Barack Obama."

The presumptive GOP nominee also predicted that, despite the presence of the Democratic convention in the state, and the president's current organizational edge here, Romney would return the Tarheel State to the Republican column in 2012.

"The president’s going to do everything he can to get North Carolina in his column, and that will not be enough because we’re gonna win North Carolina in November," Romney said, to cheers.

In a nod to recent polling that continues to show Obama's personal favorability ratings greatly outpacing his own, Romney also argued that liking the president alone was not reason enough to vote for him.

"Even if you like Barack Obama, we can't afford Barack Obama," Romney said.

People sterilized against their will under a discredited North Carolina state program should each be paid $50,000, a task force voted Tuesday, marking the first time a state has moved to compensate victims of a once-common public health practice called eugenics.

The Legislature must still approve any payments.

The panel recommended that the money go to verified, living victims, including those who are alive now but may die before the lawmakers approve any compensation. The panel had discussed amounts between $20,000 and $50,000 per person.

Before the vote, chairwoman Laura Gerald said the task force was seeking a balance between the victims' needs and political reality, noting that "compensation has been on the table now for nearly 10 years, but the state has lacked the political will to do anything other than offer an apology."

North Carolina is one of about a half dozen states to apologize for past eugenics programs, but it is alone in trying to put together a plan to compensate victims.

State officials sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 under eugenics programs, which at the time were aimed at creating what was seen as a better society by weeding out people such as criminals and mentally disabled people considered undesirable.

North Carolina was not the only state to engage in the practice. But it was different because it ramped up sterilizations after World War II despite associations between eugenics and Nazi Germany. About 70 percent of all North Carolina's sterilizations were performed after the war, peaking in the 1950s, according to state records. The state officially ended the program in 1977.

A task force report last year said 1,500 to 2,000 of those victims were still alive, and the state has verified 72 victims.

On Tuesday, some said they were simply looking forward to the issue being resolved.

"I just want it to be over," said 57-year-old Elaine Riddick, who was sterilized when she was 14 after she gave birth to a son who was the product of rape. "You can't change anything. You just let go and let God."

Riddick, a constant presence at the task force meetings, said she was surprised that the task force recommended $50,000 instead of $20,000. 

During an interview for NBC's Rock Center in November, Riddick gave an emotional account of the events leading to her sterilization. She was 13 when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967.  The state ordered that immediately after giving birth she should be sterilized.  Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.

“I have to carry these scars with me.  I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Riddick said she was never told what was happening.  “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said.  “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”

Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”

“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina.  They took something from me both times,” she said.  “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”

It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York, where she was living at the time, told her that she’d been sterilized.

“Butchered.  The doctor used that word…  I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.

Riddick once sued North Carolina for a million dollars.  Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case.  “I would like for the state of North Carolina to right what they wronged with me,” she said.

Despite the state social workers who declared Riddick was “mentally retarded” and “promiscuous”, she went to college and raised the son born moments before she was sterilized. Her son is devoted to his mother and a successful entrepreneur.

Riddick is proud of her achievements.

“I don’t know where I would be if I listened to the state of North Carolina,” she said.

Nelson Kepley / AP

Clutching a program memorializing five people who died after they were shot on Nov. 20, two people embrace outside Pleasant Garden Baptist Church after a funeral on Friday.

Hundreds of friends, teenagers and teachers filled a North Carolina church on Friday to join a family as it buried five children killed in what investigators have described as a family massacre.

Mourners packed into Pleasant Garden Baptist Church to attend the collective funeral for the five children, ages 8 to 17, who authorities say were gunned down in a shooting rampage by Mary Ann Holder, 36. Authorities say Holder apparently shot one of her sons and three other children while they slept at her Pleasant Garden home, shot and wounded her married former lover, then killed her younger son. Holder then killed herself.

Four of the children survived for days with what Sheriff BJ Barnes said were bullet wounds to the head. Holder left two notes apologizing for the pain she'd caused, Barnes said.

So many people attended the funeral in Guilford County that an overflow crowd gathered in the gym of the Family Life Center to watch a live video feed.

Four ministers led the service in the pulpit, under which lay the closed caskets of the five children. Three of the ministers eulogized the child or children they knew best.

Authorities say Holder killed her two sons: Robert Dylan Smith, 17, and Zachary Smith, 14. Barnes said she also killed the niece and nephew she took into her home when her sister died: Richard Brian Suttles, 17, and Hannaleigh Suttles, 8. She also mortally wounded Makayla Leigh Woods, Robert's 15-year-old girlfriend.

"It takes your breath away," friend Brooke Bex said. "I never thought I'd see my friends in a casket at that age."

Another friend, Adam Couch. was a pallbearer for Dylan Smith. He said he choked up when the family asked him to be part of the memorial.

"I never would have thought in a million years I'd be carrying my best friend to his grave, but I'm honored to do it," Couch said.

Holder's mother, Frances, said the family was praying that at least one of the children would survive to describe what happened. Frances Holder said she can't believe her daughter was responsible for the mass killings because she cared deeply for her children.

"People are calling my daughter a deadbeat mother, she was a no-good mother," Frances Holder said Thursday outside the church where mourners visited with the family. "She was very close to her children. I don't know what happened. I have no answers. I'm waiting for answers, just like everyone else."

Mary Ann Holder had been having an affair with Randall Lamb, 40, for more than three years, and its aftermath created months of bitter accusations involving Holder, Lamb and Lamb's wife, including allegations of stalking and harassment.

Jennifer Lamb had prepared but not yet filed a potentially costly lawsuit against Holder accusing her of alienating the affections of her husband, investigators said.

Mary Ann Holder met Randall Lamb the night before the shooting rampage to give him a $10,000 check in an apparent settlement aimed at staving off the threatened lawsuit, criminal investigators said in a search warrant. Holder then asked to meet him again the next morning in a community college parking lot.

That meeting ended with Holder firing several shots at Randall Lamb and wounding him in the shoulder. He recovered in a hospital and has returned home.

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