PITTSBURGH — Four years ago, Christian Rickers was a delegate from Virginia for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention; four months ago he voted for Bernie Sanders in the Virginia primary.

Now he’s a Trumpocrat. And he’s hoping to turn the Rust Belt red.

This is a major turnaround for someone like Rickers. His earliest childhood memories include handing out leaflets for local Virginia Democratic candidates; as a teenager he attended that famous 1992 presidential debate when George H.W. Bush was captured looking at his watch. Right after, Rickers had his picture taken with a jubilant Bill Clinton.

He also served in current Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s administration when he was governor — appointed by Kaine.

“I basically came out of the womb a Democrat,” he said.

But beginning next week, he’ll be loading a flatbed in Pittsburgh filled with “Trumpocrat” bumper stickers, signs, magnets and contact sheets, with his sights set on Cleveland and all that rich geography in between.

The reason: “It’s all about who has your back, and Donald Trump has the country’s back,” he said.

The choice isn’t ideologically based, “It is about economic prosperity, and heart and the understanding that, yes, the system is rigged and we need someone who will go in and change that,” he said.

Rickers’ plan is ambitious. The seasoned operative has identified 10 counties throughout Pennsylvania and five in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, targeting 850,000 voters total. More than enough to make a difference in both states for Trump.

After the distribution of signs, the first wave of voter interaction is going to be digital. “I am personally old-school, and I want to knock on doors using people in their own communities as well as an army of volunteers from all over,” he said.

“But we also need some money to do that,” he said. To that end, the Trumpocrat super PAC he founded and directs is modestly funded, but not without means.

His volunteers come mostly from the same Rust Belt. They’re mostly “teachers, public safety officials, energy workers, police officers and coal miners,” he said — “the same people you see every week on the soccer field, at a school board meeting or in the pew next to you in church.”

Rickers began the organization after the Virginia primary. He voted for Sanders but resolved to vote for Trump in the general election. It turned out others he knew were following the same path.

Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University, says pro-Trump sentiment in the Ohio Valley reminds him of the Reagan Democrats in the same region, and even 1990s-era Southern Democrats who hadn’t yet become Republicans.

“Here in Ohio we are seeing activists, including elected precinct committee people, the backbone of local Democratic Party organizations, switching over and voting in the Republican primary,” Sracic said of last spring’s primary contest.

Rickers grew up in the small town of Kenbridge, Va., a tobacco-farming town that has seen manufacturing come and go in his lifetime. His racially diverse neighbors don’t seem to mind his preference for Trump (Kenbridge’s population of 1,250 is 50 percent white, 44 percent black), “but I can’t say the same of some of my wine-and-cheese liberal, white Democrat friends in the big cities,” he said.

“If we are going to grow more jobs, there is no group that benefits from that more than the black community,” he said.

Activists and voters like Rickers are the known unknowns of this election cycle, yet the polls often fail to register their intensity, so they may surprise pollsters by their Election Day turnout. And in what’s looking like a close election, especially in these crucial swing states, get-out-the-vote efforts will make the difference.

Will African-American voters turn out in anywhere near the numbers that we saw in 2012? Will suburban women, who are turned off by Trump but not in love with Clinton, be motivated to show up in November? These are all open questions.

Some polls, though, are picking up an emerging “enthusiasm gap” that favors Trump over Clinton. Says Sracic, “This has to worry Clinton’s pollsters, since it will amplify the power of the crossover blue-collar voters.”

Rickers is going to try to find every single one of them, too, he says — “their voice has been shunned for too long.”