Obama volunteers in Northern Virginia on Saturday. They might not be old enough to vote, but they’re old enough to knock on doors. (Photo by Amanda Mattos)

Across the hotly contested states in today’s presidential election, thousands of volunteers are pounding down front doors and frenetically dialing through sheets of phone numbers, looking for those last, latest-breaking voters. After all the debates, television advertisements and direct mail, many voters will need to be swayed by a personal appeal.

In Virginia today, tens of thousands of campaign volunteers will be doing just that, as both campaigns fight to the last breath over the commonwealth’s 13 electoral votes.

President Obama’s re-election campaign is particularly proud of its field operation. With 61 offices spread across Virginia, the Obama campaign said it has recruited 30,000 volunteer shifts for today, according to a memo on the campaign’s website by the national field director, Jeremy Bird.

Obama’s operatives in Virginia also touted an edge in voter registration during the 2012 campaign cycle, claiming it registered more than 138,000 voters. In a memo released Sunday night, Obama’s Virginia state director, Lise Clavel, wrote that more than 100,000 black and Hispanic voters have been registered since 2008. And the most recent voter registration numbers are even more promising for the president’s re-election camp:

In the final three months of voter registration this year, 50,000 African Americans and Latinos, 105,000 people under age 35 and 87,000 women have registered to vote in Virginia—all groups among whom Obama leads Romney.

The raw numbers of phone calls and door knocks made during this campaign are even more startling. Since the beginning of 2012, Clavel wrote, Obama’s staff and volunteers in Virginia have made 12,136,377 phone calls or house visits.

A spokesman for Mitt Romney’s campaign did not respond to DCist’s inquiries about its field operations today, but the former Massachusetts governor’s people have been touting their own ground game this year. Last month, Romney’s campaign told the Richmond Times-Dispatch it had made four million voter contacts and seen 12,000 volunteer hours.