McAuliffe fights to engage politically exhausted Democrats in close of Virginia campaign

Key Facts

"This race is about the next chapter of Virginia and our country," McAuliffe said in a nod to this race being a guide to Democrats in the post-Trump era.
All of this is squarely aimed at boosting Democratic turnout in a race that seems to have passed some of the party's voters by, with a Democratic operative working in Virginia telling CNN recently that "if people don't wake up, we are in trouble."
As McAuliffe's campaign is leaning on national Democrats to turnout voters, they are also looking towards people like Jennifer Carroll Foy, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates who is supporting McAuliffe after running against him in the Democratic primary, to activate their supporters and knock on doors across the commonwealth.
Although the state has ticked blue in recent years -- Virginia last elected a Republican governor in 2009 and has been carried by Democrats in every presidential election since 2004 -- history is on their side: Since the 1970s, the winner of Virginia's off year gubernatorial election always came from the party in opposition to the White House, except for 2013 when McAuliffe won his first term just a year after Barack Obama won his second term in the White House.