Money and time would always be the hardest asks, but while Sorenson was still neck-braced and understaffed, there were plenty of basic start-up tasks to complete. One outfit offered to make the campaign an easily updatable website. Another sent a member to take photographs, which saved the campaign $700. Sorenson offhandedly mentioned that it would be nice to have a spreadsheet itemizing all of Tag Greason’s votes in his seven years in the House of Delegates — bill number, how he voted, why it matters. She had it within hours. Yet another organization delivered print-at-home postcards that recalled classic Americana, marked with parks and schools and polling places; she wanted people to keep in mind that the 32nd district was an actual place. She loved the postcards, even if she had to send repeated reminders about which disclosures were necessary to make them compliant with campaign-finance law.

It wasn’t lost on her that some of the work being done was redundant, and that some of her interactions required more effort than they ultimately returned, but Sorenson understood that the new spirits were fragile. She tried to remind herself that each group brought its own perspective or talent, even as her attempt to outline their special characteristics revealed a litany of special needs. One group was part of a Jewish organization and thus couldn’t canvass on Saturdays. Another one wanted to know how to get over to Loudoun without paying tolls, and many of its members were older and needed printed directions or car pools. But Sorenson’s willingness to keep track of and accommodate all these preferences gave her word-of-mouth fame. No research trial — volunteer-coordination software, fund-raising by text message — was too small or bug-ridden for her to disdain, and she joked that she was first in every line to serve as a guinea pig.

In June, Shaun Daniels, then an executive director of an influential PAC called Win Virginia, told me, “No one anywhere is working with more outside groups than Kathryn.” Democratic politics had entered a new era of experimentation, he said, and “this here is ground zero.”

By the middle of June, Sorenson had hired a field director and a field organizer, both from the Clinton campaign. They chose the weekend of June 24 for their earnest summer opener — a “Weekend of Action” — in part because it coincided with a Network NoVA event called the Women’s Summit. This daylong happening brought together participants from across the pop-up group universe to hear speeches from 35 of the House of Delegate candidates left standing after the Democratic primaries the week before. These primaries had delivered a remarkable slate — most of them first-time candidates, a majority of them women, including many from the working class and many of color. Sorenson did not feel competitive, and had great warmth for her colleagues in other races, but she knew that some of the pop-up groups would be tempted to exchange Reid for a candidate of greater charisma or a more diverse background, like the sheep farmer in a nearby district. She didn’t want her outside collaborators to forget that they joined up with her (and Reid’s) effort early and for good reasons.

The other salient election was the recent runoff between Jon Ossoff and Karen Handel in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. Sorenson herself was not disposed to draw any big lessons from Ossoff’s defeat, which she was by nature unable to regard as a leading indicator on the president, or the Democratic Party, or the role of outside patrons. It seemed to her that the campaign was waged about as well as it could have been in a district that was close to impossible for a Democrat to win. For many of her volunteers, however, the loss felt like a dispiriting prelude to what was supposed to be a stirring campaign kickoff.

Early in the morning, a crowd of campaign staff members, longstanding volunteers and outside irregulars milled around Reid’s home in anticipation of their canvassing shifts. The family’s two shiba inus were underfoot, the coffee table was decorated with back issues of astronomy and archaeology magazines and the whole place smelled faintly but persistently of maple syrup. There were cars from Massachusetts and Missouri, and Reid joked more than once about how he kept meaning to give out an award for the person who traveled the farthest to be there. The volunteers were mostly women, and mostly middle-aged, and had come outfitted for day hikes of moderate exertion. Whenever one of them was asked which group, if any, she had come with, there was a perceptible pause as she thought about the profusion of mailers in her inbox and posts in her Facebook feed.

Those there for the first time were nervous about how they would be greeted. A woman from Vienna, Va., named Francesca, in capri-length cargo pants, sturdy boots and a beaded necklace, raised her hand. She had come on behalf of half a dozen groups. “Am I going to look like a carpetbagger, or should I say that I care so much that I came here from elsewhere?”