TWO questions hang over this year’s mid-term elections: how will President Donald Trump affect Republican campaigns, and how should Democrats respond? For an answer to the first question, look at the Republican primary for governor of Florida. Late last year Ron DeSantis was considered a long shot. Staunchly conservative but little known outside his congressional district, he faced Adam Putnam, a fixture in Florida politics since his election to the state legislature in 1996. Then Mr Trump endorsed him. Now Mr DeSantis, who on July 30th released a television advertisement showing him building a wall with his children and reading from a book by Mr Trump, enjoys first place in the polls. At a rally on July 31st Mr Trump called him “a tough, brilliant cookie”.

The governor’s race in Georgia has been Trumped, too. Brian Kemp, whose campaign advertisements featured him threatening a teenage boy with a shotgun and boasting of his “big truck, in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself”, came second in the first round of the Republican primary after Casey Cagle, the current lieutenant-governor. After the president endorsed him, though, Mr Kemp won the run-off election.

In the general election he faces Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black woman ever elected governor in America. She is fighting uphill. Not since 1998 has Georgia elected a Democratic governor, and Democrats hold no statewide office. But Mr Trump won the rapidly diversifying state by only five points, and Ms Abrams is a strong candidate. She is detail-driven and policy-fluent, with a (Bill) Clintonian gift for retail politics. And she is running a different sort of race—one that seeks to answer the second question, about how Democrats should respond to Mr Trump.

For years, explains Bee Nguyen, a member of the Georgia House, Democrats have believed that “if we ran a more moderate campaign with a moderate policy platform…we can flip enough moderate Republicans” to win. They have mostly courted white suburbanites, relying on non-white voters to join them. That approach has failed. In 2016 Jim Barksdale lost a Senate election by over 14 points. In 2014 two scions of Georgia’s political families, Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter (grandson of President Jimmy) lost Senate and governor’s races.

By contrast, Ms Abrams is trying to expand the electorate. In 2013 she founded the New Georgia Project, which aims to register hundreds of thousands of new voters. The project says that the people it calls “the new American majority”—non-whites, unmarried women and 18- to 29-year-olds—comprise 62% of Georgia’s voting-age population but just over half its registered voters. Ms Abrams claims to have registered over 200,000 voters in the past five years, though some doubt that.

She has certainly travelled widely and invested heavily in field offices and personal appearances, especially in places where Democrats seldom go. She has also cultivated her national profile. One party activist says that the two approaches reinforce each other. Rural voters want to meet the woman they see on TV shows like the one presented by Rachel Maddow, a left-winger. Ms Abrams is unlikely to win huge numbers of rural votes. But, argues Al Williams, who represents a rural district in Georgia, “she’ll run as good as any Democrat in conservative areas, and better than any in more diverse communities.”

The Republican Governors’ Association has begun running advertisements calling Ms Abrams “too liberal for Georgia”. In fact, while she was in the legislature, her centrism irked some Democratic colleagues. She is running on a standard set of Democratic concerns: public education, Medicaid expansion and economic development—helped in the last case by Mr Kemp’s Trumpian rhetoric. During the primary campaign he backed a measure to withdraw a tax break from Delta, an airline that is a big local employer, to punish it for ending a discount for members of the National Rifle Association. He has since endorsed a move to suspend collecting taxes on jet fuel. Georgia’s many large firms might prefer a steadier hand.

Ms Abrams is, in effect, building an Obama coalition of non-white, young and white progressive voters, which Democrats have seldom tried in conservative and swing states. Rather than appealing to swing voters and hoping the Democratic base turns up because it has nowhere else to go, she is trying to broaden and energise the base while hoping to pull in some swing voters and suburban moderates repelled by Mr Kemp.

Despite Ms Abrams’s voter-registration efforts and an energised base, over 50,000 more Republicans than Democrats voted in this year’s primaries. Still, that is hundreds of thousands more than the Democrats managed in 2010 or 2014. Mr Trump’s approval rating in Georgia, though positive, has slipped, giving her an opening. And Mr Kemp was not the Republican establishment’s first choice. Like Mr Trump’s endorsement, that probably helped him prevail in the party primary. It may hurt him in the general election.

Whoever wins in November will govern Georgia in 2020—a census year, when new congressional districts are drawn. A win by Ms Abrams may mean another reliably Democratic congressional seat or two. More important, it would be a lesson for the Democratic Party about how to build winning coalitions.