Former President Donald Trump traveled on Saturday to a state few people consider a battleground in this presidential election: Virginia.
“We win Virginia, we win the whole thing without question. The whole thing,” Trump, who has made the case for months that the state is in play, told the audience. “Wouldn’t it be cool? Wouldn’t it be nice?”
Virginia was long a presidential battleground state, but a Republican hasn’t won it since George W. Bush in 2004. Since then, Democrats have carried it, with Biden widening the margin to 10 percentage points in 2020. Most polls show Vice President Kamala Harris with a comfortable lead.
And Democrats in the state have momentum coming out of 2023, when Democrats took full control of the state legislature.
“If Trump were to carry Virginia or even come within a point, it would be a tectonic break from everything we know about this race,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report.
Trump’s visit to Virginia, just three days out from Election Day, is the latest stop outside of the primary battleground states where this election is likely to be decided. On Thursday, he stopped in New Mexico to court the Latino vote. In Virginia, he continued to argue the state is part of his expanded battleground.
Democrats in the state aren’t sweating the presidential race in their own backyard.
“The decision Joe Biden made to put the torch in the hands of the next generation of leadership with Kamala created massive energy in the state of Virginia,” Sen. Tim Kaine, who is running for reelection, told NOTUS. “That can be seen in early voting, it can be seen in volunteerism ,and it’s also being seen in the polls.”
The state Democratic Party said in a statement on Trump’s visit that Democrats have knocked on more than 2 million doors in Virginia, and that their ground game includes nearly 200 people on staff and 25,000 volunteers.
“Donald Trump has been soundly defeated every time he’s run in Virginia,” said Aaron Fritschner, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign in Virginia, in a statement. He added that Trump is “welcome to waste his time campaigning here.”
As of four days from Election Day, more than 2.1 million ballots have been cast in Virginia compared to almost 2.6 million at the same point in 2020, according to data from The Virginia Public Access Project.
However confident Democrats are feeling about the state and however promising the data may be for them, the reality is that Republicans winning statewide in Virginia is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. In 2021, Glenn Youngkin won a statewide race for the governor’s seat, as he kept Trump at arm’s length.
Republicans in the state, including Youngkin, are now embracing him.
“We at the state party have had a great working partnership with the campaign and we’ve seen a real outpouring of grassroots enthusiasm for President Trump throughout the Commonwealth,” said Ken Nunnenkamp, executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia, in a statement to NOTUS.
Down ballot, Kaine is running for reelection against Republican candidate Hung Cao. (Kaine has a comfortable lead in the polls.) Cao has made appearances at Trump events multiple times this election cycle, including appearing at the Trump rally on Saturday.
“Virginia is in play and both President Trump and I are gaining momentum,” Cao said in a statement to NOTUS. “Virginians have been clear that they want change, and we are the only candidates who can and will bring it.”
The Harris campaign has, in recent weeks, leaned heavily into courting Republican voters. Two former Republican members of Congress from Virginia have become prominent supporters of her campaign.
One of them — former Rep. Barbara Comstock — appeared along with Democrats at a canvass launch party in Loudoun County ahead of the Trump rally on Saturday.
“I was Never Trump from the jump,” Comstock said. “This area [has] always had a bipartisan coalition that supported our federal employees, our retirees, certainly our military.”
Having Republican voters in the fold is crucial for Harris in Virginia, said Levar Stoney, Democratic mayor of Richmond and a candidate in Virginia’s 2025 race for lieutenant governor.
“We also know that our Republicans, who have seen what four years of Donald Trump is … they’re going to follow the lead of people like [former] Vice President [Dick] Cheney and Liz Cheney and vote for Harris. I feel that deep in my bones,” Stoney said.
Susan Swecker, the chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia, told NOTUS that while she’s confident in a blue win for Virginia, it’s hard to compare this year’s election to recent ones.
She pointed to 2020 happening during the pandemic as one example of how this one is different from the last.
“I like where we are, but I know there is work that still needs to be done, because the consequences here are very serious and stark, and so we all need to continue,” Swecker said.
Throughout the rally, Trump insisted he will win the state and gave shout-outs to state politicians including Youngkin and Cao.
Virginia Rep. Don Beyer, who is also a Democrat, said it’s hard to believe Trump’s rally will make much of a difference.
“It’s really hard to imagine Virginia is in play right now,” said Beyer. “I feel very good not just about the [poll] percentages but really good about the turnout. I don’t know a single person who says they’re not going to vote.”
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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.