By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and his advisers have taken this lesson from the past two presidential elections, in which Democratic nominees lost narrowly: focusing all of the party’s campaign efforts on the Democratic-leaning states and a handful of crucial “swing” states is a very limiting — and risky — strategy.

That was made clear at a Wednesday briefing at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe described the presumed Democratic nominee’s plan to battle Sen. John McCain , the GOP nominee-to-be, on a wide playing field — including many states that went Republican in the presidential election four years ago.

Though Obama leads McCain in national public preference polls, that does not guarantee him the patchwork of state wins to amass the 270 electoral votes or more needed to win the White House contest. The most recent presidential election, which was closely contested, is a template against which to evaluate this year’s contest. President George W. Bush in 2004 won 31 states, for a total of 286 electoral votes. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry , the Democratic challenger, won 19 states and the District of Columbia, for a total of 252 electoral votes.

The Obama campaign’s “first strategic goal,” Plouffe said, “is to hold on to the Kerry states” and then wrest away one or more states that backed Bush in 2004. Obama could accomplish this by winning Ohio, which clinched the 2004 election in Bush’s favor as it gave him its 20 electoral votes by a 2 percentage-point margin, or Florida (27 electoral votes), site of the historically controversial and razor-thin vote margin that put Bush over the top in 2000.

Obama faces obstacles in both places. Though he campaigned heavily in Ohio in advance of the state’s March 4 primary, he lost that contest by 10 points to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton . He is playing catch-up in Florida, which violated national Democratic Party scheduling rules by staging its primary on Jan. 29, prompting a ban on candidate campaigning that Obama observed.

But Plouffe stressed the campaign’s view that there are many ways for Obama to win a majority in the Electoral College. “We have a lot of different combinations to get to 270,” he said.

In his briefing Plouffe divvied the 50 states into five tiers of competitiveness. There are states that are “strong” for Obama or “strong” McCain, and which at the moment appear uncompetitive; states that “lean” toward Obama and McCain but are in play; and “battleground” states that, in the Obama campaign’s view, are the most competitive.

It is that last group that includes the largest number of states (18) and cumulative electoral votes (199). And it is a list that suggests the Obama campaign is not daunted by poor performances by past Democratic presidential candidates.

The states are Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. These are also the 18 states in which the Obama campaign is airing its first general election television advertisement, a 60-second spot featuring the candidate in which he emphasizes his biography and professes his love of country.

“The good news from our perspective is that there are a lot more Bush states on here than there are Kerry states,” Plouffe said.

Of the states labeled by Plouffe as the most competitive, four went to Kerry in 2004 but by too-close-for-comfort margins: Michigan (3.4 percentage points), Pennsylvania (2.5 points), New Hampshire (1.3 points), and Wisconsin (0.4 points).

Some of the 14 Bush states on the list also were battlegrounds in 2004. Iowa and New Mexico went to Bush by less than 1 point, Ohio by just more than 2 points, Nevada by less than 3 points, Colorado and Florida by roughly 5 points, and Missouri by a bit more than 7 points.

Plouffe acknowledged, though, that there are some states on the Obama campaign’s battleground list in which Democrats historically have struggled. They include Alaska, Montana and North Dakota, all of which backed Bush by more than 20 percentage points in 2004. But Plouffe insisted that those three states were “enormously competitive” and that Obama, who won caucuses in Alaska and North Dakota and a primary in Montana earlier this year, had strong campaign organizations there that are especially important in lesser-populated states.