It’s still too early to know whether Democrats should despair without their motivating man. The Democratic primary is still a couple weeks away, on June 8, and Democrats have time to get organized before November. But Republicans already seem positioned to perform better in Virginia than they have for the past four years. Virginia voters tend to elect governors from the opposite party of the one in power, and a Democrat is currently sitting in the White House. Democratic voters also tend to turn out in lower numbers than Republicans in off-year elections; already, early-voting turnout for the Democratic primary has been low. Democrats, and activists especially, are tired after four years spent dutifully knocking on doors and begging strangers to please vote. Marianne Burke, a 67-year-old retiree who leads the Democratic group Fairfax Indivisible, has noticed a clear decline in volunteer engagement since Biden’s win. In February, she struggled to get group members to help mail postcards reminding Virginians to register to vote, and she had to write hundreds of them herself. She gets it: “There’s not this urgency. You don’t wake up in the morning and say, My God, what’s [Trump] gonna do today?” she told me. “I’m cautiously optimistic” that Democrats will rally in time to help Democrats win in November, she added. “But it is so nice to not have to constantly worry … so I can understand why they wouldn’t want to.” Michael Zuckerman, a 70-year-old professor at George Washington University, told me he’s worried about his fellow Democratic voters. Their work “has made a difference, and we need to keep it up,” Zuckerman said, after we met at the park for Gooditis’s event. He’s volunteered for Democratic candidates since 2016. “We’ve come very close to losing democracy, and I’m not sure we’re out of the woods.”