At the same time, Democrats are being mobilized in ways that I actually had not even seen in 2024. In Virginia specifically, there’s a group called Rural Ground Game—they’re doing fantastic work—and they’ve recruited, in every race at the state level, a candidate. And that’s unheard of.
Now, a lot of those candidates are going to lose. A lot of the Democrats who are running in rural Virginia are going to lose. But the fact that they have somebody running in every race is going to increase the margins, even just a little bit, in those areas. One thing that we always say is: you’ve got to lose by less. And that is something that, when you have candidates running in every race—like Rural Ground Game is working on in Virginia—it’s going to bring up the statewide numbers.
And so I think, because you have those two factors—the Trump base cooling, and then also Democrats getting mobilized, and the Democratic base being mobilized—and that mobilization coming from small towns and rural communities, in addition to the more urban areas, I think it’s going to have an impact.
Sargent: Well, it seems to me that you’re getting at a critical aspect of what Democrats are trying to do a little more of these days, which is going into rural communities and finding the Democrats in those places, right? Because, you know, in the southwest tip of Virginia, Democrats are vastly, vastly outnumbered by Republicans and Trump voters. It’s in Appalachia and so forth. But there are still some Democrats there. And if I understand the new thinking, or at least some of the recent thinking, properly, the idea is to go and find Democrats in places where they’re outnumbered just to get those statewide totals higher for the Democratic Party. Can you talk a little bit about that innovation and you know, whether we’re going to see some of that succeed in Virginia and what that means.
