STERLING, Va. — As Jesus Rodriguez and Kyle Jacobson prepared to talk to the first voter of their day of canvassing last weekend, the woman who came to the door pre-empted them.
“Is this a political thing?” she asked Rodriguez. “Because we’ve had so many people here, I’m so done with this. I’m sorry.”
The brief interaction illustrates the intensity and the stakes of the campaign in Virginia, where Republicans hope to flip the state Senate and hold the state House of Delegates, which would give them full control of the state government. Rodriguez and Jacobson, who work for the Virginia chapter of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), were in suburban Loudoun County urging voters to turn out for one of the group’s endorsed candidates for state Senate: Republican businessman Juan Pablo Segura.
Segura is running for Senate District 31 against Democrat Russet Perry, a former prosecutor in the Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney office.
They two are competing in one of the most-watched state Senate races in Virginia as Democrats seek to flip the House of Delegates and retain control of the state Senate.
Senate District 31, encompassing parts of Loudoun and Fauquier counties, is one of Republicans’ most crucial targets and a bellwether in northern Virginia. Voters in the district have been bombarded with election-related mail, ads and signs as Election Day next Tuesday nears. They’re also getting a lot of door-knocks from both sides — the AFP canvassers crossed paths with a canvasser for Perry’s campaign, exchanging genuine pleasantries as they went about their work.
The civil interaction bore almost no resemblance to the campaign voters are watching on TV, where Perry accuses Segura of being a “MAGA extremist” and Segura tells viewers Perry has a “radical ideology.”
AFP’s volunteers aren’t deterred by the meanness on the airwaves. They view Segura as a principled, conservative leader on education, energy policy and taxes.
And C.J. Sailor, AFP’s Virginia state director, has said the group’s goal is “working toward winning a policy majority in the House and Senate to advance economic growth, energy abundance, and education opportunity for all Virginians.”
In particular, the group hopes to make its position on education a winning issue for voters in Loudoun County.
“We can do something about it through folks that we elect that are going to be champions for educational freedom. Educational freedom is going to be our No. 1 one priority going into the General Assembly in 2024,” Sailor told door-knockers at a breakfast pep talk Saturday morning.
AFP and its affiliate groups hope that the issue of education will be particularly salient for one group: Hispanic voters.
“The fact is that the Hispanic community in Virginia is super aligned on education freedom,” said Joshua Raimundo, the Virginia strategic director for the Libre Initiative, an affiliate of AFP that targets Spanish-speaking voters.
A few neighborhoods over from the AFP door-knockers, employees of the Libre Initiative successfully convinced one Spanish-speaking voter to vote for Segura, referring to his position on education.
“On the doors, I do see a lot of enthusiasm. People are very fired up about education,” Raimundo said.
One issue that Democrats have seized on in this election is abortion. Gov. Glenn Youngkin and other Republicans have promised to pass a 15-week limit on abortion in Virginia if they win the state government trifecta.
AFP doesn’t consider abortion in their messaging to voters, opting instead to focus on the economy, crime and education.
Virginia has seen a few razor-close elections in recent years, giving groups like AFP backup for their belief that every single voter contact could matter.
At the breakfast pep talk, Sailor told voters about the spring primary elections for the Legislature, when Glen Sturtevant, an AFP-endorsed candidate, advanced to the general election after winning the GOP primary by just 375 votes.
“That was in part due to our grassroots efforts, folks like yourself, were down there — maybe some of you were there — knocking on doors making contact with voters, face-to-face contact with voters,” Sailor said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
