In off-year election, Democrats focus on luring African American and young Virginians McAuliffe is trying to replicate the science of voter turnout that President Obama perfected in 2008 and 2012 - notably in Virginia. The pledge cards are part of it. Mitch Stewart, who worked for Obama and is informally advising McAuliffe, said pledge cards were important in 2012 and they're important now. "The impact will be even higher in an off-year election than in a presidential," he said. The campaign's strategy also includes old-fashioned phone calls, mail and door-knocking; Democrats say they have knocked on the doors of nearly 300,000 African American households. They are also relying on more modern social-media techniques and targeted advertising, all designed to spur enthusiasm for a contest that traditionally doesn't inspire much. Their targets include people such as Julia Dumais, a 28-year-old Web developer from Woodbridge. She attended a rally Sunday in Dale City with McAuliffe and former president Bill Clinton after receiving an e-mailed invitation from the McAuliffe campaign. But the courtship of Dumais has gone well beyond one e-mail. "I just pretty much don't answer the phone during election season," Dumais said. I get a ton of mail from both campaigns and a fair number of calls, but I usually don't pick up. In recent years, turnout by African Americans and young voters has fluctuated wildly from election to election. According to calculations of Census Bureau data by Michael P. McDonald, a George Mason University professor and expert on turnout, African American voters in Virginia turned out at a rate of 79 percent in 2008 and 44 percent in 2010. For younger voters - 18 to 28 - the turnout rates for those elections were 69 percent and 27 percent, respectively. The same turnout data is not available for the 2009 gubernatorial election, but the exit poll that year showed that African Americans made up 16 percent of the state's electorate and young voters 10 percent, compared with 20 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in the 2012 exit poll. In a Washington Post/Abt-SRBI poll released Monday, 64 percent of registered voters said they were certain that they would cast ballots. Among black voters in the poll, it was 56 percent. With McAuliffe leading in every public survey, Republicans are resting their increasingly thin hopes for Cuccinelli on the idea that the electorate next week will look more like the one four years ago. Why, Republicans wonder privately, would black voters be more motivated now than they were in November 2009 - just a year after Obama won his historic election?