Fairfax, Va. – “IT’S THE DAY BEFORE SUPER TUESDAY, AND WHERE IS HILLARY CLINTON?!” Governor Terry McAuliffe thundered into the mic at a Fairfax rally on Monday. “THE GREATEST STATE IN THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH, THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!”

Clinton is closing her campaign’s all-important Super Tuesday push in Virginia, where poll after poll gives her a decisive advantage. Bill Clinton visited the state last Thursday. While Bernie Sanders focuses on northern and western states showing razor-thin poll margins, she and her surrogates are spending an inordinate amount of time in a place where she’s up by an average of nearly 20 points. Why?

“I wouldn’t be surprised, doing events right before Super Tuesday here is a little bit of a nod of the importance of Virginia in the general,” Democratic senator Tim Kaine tells National Review, moments before helping introduce Clinton onstage. “President Obama often spent right before Election Night in Virginia in ’08, and he did the same thing in ‘12.”

What about the rumor that Governor McAuliffe is on Clinton’s short list for vice president? Could that also play a role? “Yes! Yes,” Kaine says, pointing for extra emphasis. “I think Governor McAuliffe, that personal relationship, may be a reason why she’s here — to be with him.”

McAuliffe certainly sounded like a candidate on Monday, spending more time touting Virginia’s budget surplus and $1 billion education investment than he did praising Clinton’s record. Clinton herself went out of her way to praise her “dear friend,” who’s also a longtime Clinton-family fundraiser. “I am thrilled to have this opportunity to spend a little time with you the day before this important election,” she told McAuliffe as he stood, beaming, next to her at the podium.

The rumor is that Governor McAuliffe is on Clinton’s short list for vice president.

Clinton’s focus on Virginia — both as a key general-election battleground and for the potential vice-presidential pick it contains — underscores her campaign’s belief that she’s about to bury Bernie Sanders. Just like at her husband’s Virginia rally last week, talk of her Democratic challenger was entirely upstaged by discussion of her probable Republican opponent.

“I think she’s going to be facing off against Donald Trump,” said Kaine during his speech, drawing boos from the around 300 Democrats in attendance. “Trump said in the debate a couple weeks back, ‘The American military is a disaster.’ I don’t want somebody who is a commander-in-chief to talk that way about the 1.6 million American men and women who volunteered, in a time of war, to serve their country! I want a commander-in-chief who respects the military and their families – who will greet them with gratitude, not contempt.”

#share#Clinton also seemed fixated on Trump, repeating the Republican’s slogan in a phrase fast becoming a fixture at her own campaign rallies. “You know, America never stopped being great,” she said. “We have to make America WHOLE again!”

Even when she took a shot at Sanders, she couldn’t resist twisting it back against Trump. “I do have a disagreement with my esteemed opponent in the Democratic primary, because he wants to give everybody free college,” she said. “I am not going to tax you and your family to send Donald Trump’s youngest child to college FOR FREE!”

Clinton’s confident anti-Trump posture doesn’t necessarily show complacency against the still-simmering Sanders threat. Though reeling from a close loss in Nevada and an utter rout in South Carolina, the Vermont senator remains a prolific fundraiser capable of pulling delegates from states with whiter Democratic electorates. His campaign expects to announce a $40 million haul in February donations alone. And Massachusetts, Michigan, and Oklahoma are all probable pick-ups for Sanders on Super Tuesday.

#related#But Virginia has a role to play in that fight, too. “She wants to try to blow Bernie out,” says Robert Guttman, director at the Center for Politics and Foreign Relations at Fairfax’s George Mason University. By bursting Sanders’s bubble in a purple state considered a must-win for presidential candidates of either party, Clinton hopes to demonstrate she’s the best bet to take on the Republican nominee in November.

That won’t happen, of course, should Virginia’s Clinton voters grow complacent. “We are, probably more than any other state, the state that’s the bellwether. But know this — when the spotlight’s on, you got to do your best work,” Kaine warned the crowd. “When you’re in the battleground and everybody’s counting on you, you got to produce.”