National Public Radio (NPR) reported from Rio Rancho, the population center of what NPR believes is the swing county in the middle of what has been the closest swing state in the nation the past two elections.

Politically, New Mexico is really three states: a strongly Republican south and east, a strongly Democratic north and a moderate middle, where most of the voters live.

Barack Obama and John McCain have been campaigning heavily in New Mexico; Obama has made five appearances in the Land of Enchantment and McCain has made four.

I do have a bone to pick with NPR’s reporter Ted Robbins. Sure we have “high desert, Indian Pueblos and stunning vistas” here in Sandoval County. And sure, Rio Rancho may be considered “a fairly moderate community,” but it’s fightin’ words to say that “politics in New Mexico also tends to be fairly low-key.”

Robbins did find a dichotomy between the Obama office in Rio Rancho and a McCain office down the street. While the Obama office was “crammed with at least a dozen new Obama volunteers,” the McCain office was closed.

Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com reported similar happenings nationwide.

“We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls,” Quinn wrote while in Missouri.

In Colorado, Quinn noticed the same thing:

But in Colorado on Saturday and Sunday, we found every office but the Cortez office closed. The Durango office was closed on Saturday. The Grand Junction office was closed on Sunday. In Glenwood Springs, Eagle, and Dillon — where we stopped in at busy Obama offices — McCain and/or Republican Party offices were either closed or nonexistent.

Of course, the real reason why the McCain office was closed is because … there is no McCain campaign office in Rio Rancho, according to McCain’s website.

So where was he? No idea.