Gayatri Agnew, a 36-year-old millennial, looked for Arkansas’s political unicorns for a long time.

She was looking for, you know, that woman: The empty-nester who would run for office in her late sixties or the career woman whose kids are long done with potty training. She was looking for somebody who wasn’t the mother of a two-year-old and a four-year-old. She was searching for the candidate who wasn't her. But Agnew didn’t find the unicorn — so, she decided to challenge her local representative on her own.

Agnew, the senior director of a prominent corporate foundation, hopes her experiences as a mother to preschool-aged kids can bring something significant to the political table in 2018. Agnew is part of a small community of progressive candidates under 45 — including Kelly Scott Unger, Christie Craig, and Celeste Williams — who found themselves running grassroots political campaigns for the Arkansas State Legislature in Trump country.

“I can paint this profile of this unicorn woman in my mind who’s the perfect person to run and she's like everyone else who's ever run, and she'd do a great job, right? But I couldn't find her,” Agnew tells Teen Vogue. “And through my own journey of wondering how to find a candidate whose life makes more sense for politics, I've actually chosen to take the path of trying to make politics make more sense for working moms.”

Gaytari Agnew (left) Courtesy of Gayatri Agnew for Arkansas District 93

Running for office as a Democrat in Arkansas isn’t an easy task, especially in conservative strongholds. The Democratic party has taken heat for reportedly not paying enough attention to county- and state-level races over a period of decades, and red-state Democrats are often left without adequate resources, according to former Democratic politicians.

“The state party is still trying to rebuild and recuperate,” Chelsea Miller, a political consultant for Agnew, says of Arkansas’s Democrats. “And so these candidates — these brilliant women with all these ideas — just keep hitting the walls over and over again. Certainly, it is no cakewalk, but these are winnable. I've been so thrilled by the movement.”

The Democratic women are setting the party politics aside and focusing on grassroots campaigning — the traditional door knocking and farmer’s market visits where they can learn what matters to the constituents. Agnew, an Indian-American Democrat, is campaigning for fixing residential sidewalks and regional transportation plans, among other issues.