Every weekend since August, 17-year-old Joyce Jiang has gone out to canvass voters near her home in Stafford, Virginia. But the high school senior isn’t knocking on doors for Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders, or any other candidate who will be on a ballot in 2020. She’s knocking on doors for Qasim Rashid, a progressive Democrat running for state senate.

Virginia is one of four states where voters cast ballots for state legislative elections in an “off-year,” when neither a presidential nor midterm contest is taking place. And while Iowa may get most of the glory when it comes to predicting presidential nominees, when Virginia voters head to the polls on November 5, the results of that contest will help indicate which way the political winds are blowing a year before the presidential election.

“People kind of forget about the importance of state politics,” said Harita Iswara, 19, a sophomore at George Washington University who previously served on the executive board of the school’s chapter of the College Democrats. She estimates the group’s made 500 phone calls so far to help with efforts to get out the vote in Virginia and, as part of her role as a fellowship coordinator with the progressive group Swing Left, estimates her fellows have sent “at least” a thousand letters to voters in the state. “A lot of the grassroots work that we do is geared toward state politics because it’s honestly at times more important. People [are] affected day to day by issues in their state,” Harita told Teen Vogue.

That importance is hard to overestimate, especially in Virginia, where the state’s population demographics mirror those of the country more closely than almost any of the four early-voting states. Virginia’s November 2017 elections were a test of grassroots anger toward President Trump in the early months of his administration, and a harbinger of the historical electoral accomplishments the nation would see in the 2018 midterms, including a record turnout by young voters. According to a poll by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), estimated turnout among young voters ages 18–29 in Virginia’s off-year elections doubled between 2009 and 2017, reaching 34% percent and exceeding the record-breaking turnout that saw an estimated 31% of young people 18–29 cast a ballot in the 2018 midterms.

“We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to channel that momentum,” Alexsis Rodgers, 28, president of the Virginia Young Democrats, told Teen Vogue. “I think people understand that going into 2020, we need to send a strong message…that we are supporting certain values and certain candidates who are going to fight for us,” Rodgers said. Already, Rodgers points out, college students are expected to cast a record number of absentee ballots. “I’m really optimistic that young people will continue to make their voices heard [this year],” she continued.

“My family’s always been impacted by…the government,” says Joyce, whose father was deported to China when she was two. While Republicans currently have a narrow hold on both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly, with 51–48 in the House of Delegates and 20–19 in the Senate and a vacancy in each, student activists like Joyce have the chance to help elect a legislature that will speak to some of the greatest concerns among young voters. Joyce and others say gun violence has been an especially important issue for mobilizing young people to vote.

For Thomas Kipp, 20, the issue of gun violence is extremely personal. A Swing Left college fellow and president of the Young Democrats at Virginia Commonwealth University, Thomas moved to Israel with his family, where he lived during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. When the family returned to Virginia, Thomas’s older brother enrolled as a student at Virginia Tech, where he was scheduled to be in one of the classrooms where a shooter opened fire on April 16, 2007, killing 33 people. His brother wasn’t in class that day, but Thomas told Teen Vogue, “I just remember watching the panic my parents went through, and every time there’s been a shooting since. I feel like my family narrowly escaped that. And all these other people are not as lucky.”