A pair of young volunteers for Democrat Stacey Abrams' campaign for Georgia governor stood under umbrellas on a sloping suburban street in Decatur, a 15-minute drive east of Atlanta, chewing over Georgia's premier political contest -- and one of the country's most watched.

Olivia Volkert and Quinn Mulholland, both 22-year-old recent college grads, had their fliers stacked, talking points ready and an app in hand that pointed them to potential supporters' doors. They explained why this time around -- with this Democratic candidate -- feels so different.

"First and foremost, she's an African American woman running for governor in Georgia. That speaks for itself," Volkert said.

"I also think," Mulholland added, "that there's something to be said for the novelty of having a Democrat in the South running as an unapologetic progressive. You don't really often see that, so I think it's something that excites Democrats across the country."

They called it a "new playbook" -- a rejection, Volkert said, of "the centrist, middle-of-the-road approach didn't work for Jason Carter." Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, challenged Gov. Nathan Deal in 2014. He ran what's long been the textbook campaign for Georgia Democrats and, as has become their custom, lost.

Abrams, they said, is going another route.

"Mobilize and excite the base and increase turnout among people who are actually Democrats," is how Mulholland described it. "That really hasn't been tried (here) before and I think it's something that could become a national template if it works."

That strategy is being tested in the Georgia governor's race, which pits Abrams against the state's Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who won his primary with the backing of President Donald Trump. Abrams and Kemp will face off for the first time Tuesday night in a debate.

A glance at Georgia's political visitor log in 2018 would suggest the young canvassers were on to something. Democrats considering presidential bids have been stalking the state for months, from the early stages of a primary that Abrams would capture in a landslide through to these final weeks of the general election. If she emerges on November 6 -- or after a December run-off, should neither candidate in this neck-and-neck race score a majority next month -- as the governor-elect, it would bolster a sense of Democratic viability in weakening Republican stronghold, transforming it in the eyes of political strategists into a 2020 battleground.

Abrams' campaign, driven by a progressive policy agenda and political vocabulary, but leavened with friendly appeals to the state's cautious business community, would be held up as an outline for how to win it.

National fights come home to Georgia

On the Republican side, Kemp is following a roadmap of his own.

His campaign has relentlessly sought to portray Abrams as an extremist, falsely accusing her of trying to drive undocumented immigrants to the polls, and describing the former state House minority leader as an agent of the far left. He will likely continue that line of attack in Tuesday's debate, which comes a day after Abrams' participation in a 1992 protest that involved burning the Georgia flag, which at the time included the Confederate battle emblem, resurfaced in The New York Times.

In response to questions over his office's handling of voter registrations, Kemp in a recent op-ed suggested -- as he has throughout -- that the concerns were ginned up by an Abrams campaign that had "felt a sudden loss of momentum."

"Instead of hitting the road to connect with Georgia voters," he wrote, "they manufactured a 'crisis' and asked left-wing allies to fan the flames." (Abrams began an "early vote bus tour" on October 15, which will run on-and-off through Election Day.)

In an interview after she addressed an education summit at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Abrams recalled early skepticism over her campaign tactics transforming into an almost giddy curiosity over "how we made it work, especially in the Deep South," after the primary.

"I'm an African American woman who is charting a very different path to doing this," Abrams said. "I think people want to know: Will it work? But I also think they're excited by the possibility it could work. Because it changes the conversation about how we have these debates, how we run these campaigns. It shows that there's another way to win."

Hours earlier, Ayanna Pressley, the Boston city councilor who is poised in 2019 to become the first African-American woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress, spoke alongside Abrams at digitalundivided, an incubator for minority women entrepreneurs, in downtown Atlanta.