The survey highlights the challenges facing McCain and the GOP during the final stretch of the election, as Obama has made evident progress in the Old Dominion the past month.

By wide margins, Virginia voters think that Obama is the candidate who would do more to bring needed change to Washington, who understands the economic challenges people are facing and who is the more honest and trustworthy of the two rivals. Still, there remains widespread apprehension over whether the Democratic nominee would make a good commander in chief.

McCain's path to the White House is very difficult without Virginia's 13 electoral votes, and Obama now leads the senator from Arizona 52 percent to 44 percent in the new poll.

In a Washington Post-ABC News Virginia poll taken late last month, Obama clung to a slim 3 percentage-point edge among likely voters. As an example of the gains he has made since that poll, Obama is now tied with McCain among college-educated white men, overcoming what had been an almost 30-point deficit for the Democrat.

A Democratic presidential nominee has not carried the state since 1964, but Obama has amassed what Virginia Democrats see as the most comprehensive political organization in modern times for a statewide campaign.

Obama has opened almost 50 offices, dispatched more than 250 paid staffers and recruited thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and call voters across the state.

The poll indicates that Obama's staff and volunteers have made staggering gains in reaching out to Virginia's 5 million registered voters. More than half of all voters surveyed said they have been contacted in person, on the phone or by e-mail or text message about voting for Obama, far more than said so about McCain.

Obama's ground game is being supplemented with a highly energized base of supporters who could give him an advantage in the important get-out-the vote effort.

Seven in 10 Obama supporters said they are "very enthusiastic" about voting for him, an increase from the late September poll. By contrast, 39 percent are that keen on McCain's candidacy, a 6 percentage-point dip over that period.

Obama has an almost 2 to 1 advantage over McCain in Northern Virginia, surpassing even the 60 percent mark that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) racked up in the region during their successful campaigns in 2005 and 2006.

Obama is also performing far better elsewhere in Virginia than Democrats have done in recent state and federal elections. He and McCain each drew 48 percent of the vote outside Northern Virginia, a signal that Obama's repeated visits, as well as his multimillion-dollar advertising blitz, has softened the GOP base in the more rural parts of the state.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions.

"There is so much money coming in and yet very little ability to say with certainty that you know who is giving it," said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel.

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama's staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat's fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama's fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign's interest as it is in the public's interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.

In a paper outlining those safeguards, provided to The Washington Post, the campaign said it runs twice-daily sweeps of new donations, looking for irregularities. Flagged contributions are manually reviewed by a team of lawyers, then cleared or refunded. Reports of misused credit cards lead to immediate refunds.

In September, according to the campaign, $1.8 million in online contributions was flagged, and $353,000 was refunded. Of the contributions flagged because a foreign address or bank account was involved, 94.1 percent were found to be proper. One-tenth of one percent were marked for refund, and 5.77 percent are still being vetted.

But clearly invented names have been used often enough to provoke an outcry from Republican critics. Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.

Obama officials said they have identified similar irregularities in the finance records of their Republican rival, Sen. John McCain. "Every campaign faces these challenges -- John McCain's campaign has refunded more than $1.2 million in contributions from anonymous, excessive and fraudulent contributors -- and we have reviewed and strengthened our procedures to ensure that the contributions the campaign accepts are appropriate," said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.

McCain's contributor database shows at least 201 donations from individuals listing themselves as "anonymous" or "anonymous anonymous," according to Obama's campaign. In one particularly embarrassing episode, the McCain campaign mistakenly sent a fundraising solicitation to the Russian ambassador to the United Nations.

Rather than relying primarily on a network of wealthy and well-connected bundlers -- as candidates have since President Bush pioneered that technique in 2000 -- Obama also tapped a list of 3 million ordinary donors, many of whom who gave in increments of $25 and $50.

Sen. Barack Obama, in Indianapolis, Indiana, boards a plane Thursday to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii.

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The ad plays heavily edited clips of Biden's remarks over images of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as stock videos of tanks, terrorists and a crying child.

"Listen to Joe Biden, talking about what electing Barack Obama will mean," the ad begins before introducing Biden's words from Sunday: "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama. ... The world is looking. ... We're going to have an international crisis ... to test the mettle of this guy. ... I guarantee you it's going to happen."

The ad concludes, "It doesn't have to happen. Vote McCain." Watch a report on the mud being slung »

The McCain campaign said it will be putting the ad on airwaves in 14 battleground states.

The ad comes a day after McCain spent the day addressing economic issues on the campaign trail in Florida and as Obama takes a campaigning hiatus to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii.

Obama, who leads McCain 51 percent to 42 percent, according to Thursday's CNN poll of polls, will be replaced by his wife, Michelle Obama. She will fill in for the Democratic presidential candidate in Columbus and Akron, two stops in the battleground state of Ohio.

McCain will visit Colorado, a state that President Bush won in 2000 and 2004. The most recent CNN poll of polls shows Obama leading McCain there 50 percent to 44 percent.

McCain has events scheduled in Denver, Colorado Springs and Durango. Durango is on the border with New Mexico, where Obama leads by 5 percentage points, according to the most recent Research & Polling Inc. survey conducted for the Albuquerque Journal.

Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, have both made stops in Colorado this week, and Obama will campaign there Sunday.

Biden will make Friday stops in Charleston, West Virginia; Danville, Virginia; and Martinsville, Virginia. Martinsville is on the border with the battleground state of North Carolina. Watch what's next for the candidates »

Obama campaigned Thursday in Indiana. He then flew to Honolulu, Hawaii, to spend the day with his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, whose health is deteriorating after she suffered a broken hip. He traveled directly to her home after landing at the airport.

Obama said in an interview for Friday's "Good Morning America" that Dunham has been "inundated" with flowers and messages from strangers who read about her in Obama's 1995 book, "Dreams From My Father."

"Maybe she is getting a sense of long-deserved recognition toward the end of her life," he said.

Obama resumes campaigning Saturday with visits to three Western states. The campaign has not specified which states, but New Mexico is expected to be among them.

Palin also will have to take a break from campaigning Friday as she and her husband, Todd Palin, are scheduled to give depositions in St. Louis, Missouri, on the July firing of Walt Monegan as the Alaska public safety commissioner.

Alaska's Personnel Board is looking into whether Palin unfairly fired Monegan.

The Alaska governor is scheduled to deliver a speech Friday morning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before traveling to Missouri. She will hold a rally in Springfield before giving her deposition. Afterward, she is scheduled to drop the hockey puck at the St. Louis Blues game against the Los Angeles Kings.

On Thursday night, Palin continued her line of attack on Obama, criticizing his association with domestic-terrorist-turned-activist William Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the candidate's former minister.

"What did those characters see in Barack Obama? Why would they have wanted to be associated with him?" Palin asked during an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity in Beaver, Pennsylvania.

Also Thursday, Palin addressed the Republican National Committee's purchase of $150,000 in pricey clothing for her, telling the Chicago Tribune that most of the clothes are still in her campaign airplane.

The designer clothing she has worn, she said, will be returned, auctioned off or donated to charity.

"If people knew how Todd and I and our kids shop so frugally. My favorite shop is a consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska, called Out of the Closet," she said. "It is not Fifth Avenue-type of shopping."

She further suggested that gender bias was driving the controversy.

"Hillary Clinton was held to a different standard in her primary race. Do you remember the conversations that took place about her, say superficial things that they don't talk about with men -- her wardrobe and her hairstyles, all of that?" she asked. "That's a bit of that double standard."

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