This is a version of Crosscut's election newsletter. Sign up here!

Before anyone knew who Patty Murray was, she was a mom driving home from Olympia with two young kids in the back seat of her car — and she was fuming. A hands-squeezing-the-steering-wheel kind of angry.

Earlier that week the instructor at her kids’ preschool informed her that the program was closing because of budget cuts enacted by the state Legislature.

Up to that point, Murray, a teacher, hadn’t been politically active. Despite growing up in Washington state, she had never even been to the state capitol. But she put her kids in the car and drove to Olympia anyways.

When she got to the capitol campus, she tried talking to legislators, but no one would listen. When she finally found a state legislator who would, he let her talk and then looked right at her and said, “That’s nice, but you can’t make a difference. You’re just a mom in tennis shoes.”

As she drove home to Bothell, she made a promise to her son and daughter. “I’m not going to let him get away with this,” she remembers repeatedly telling them. “He is not going to get away with this.”

Then she started plotting.

“I started thinking, okay, what can I do?” Murray says now. “If I call five of my friends and we find five other people … how do we reach more people? How do I get in contact with other moms and dads throughout the state who have kids in preschool and get them motivated? And that’s what we did.”

Murray helped build a coalition of 12,000 other angry parents. They sent letters, made phone calls and rallied their children on the steps of the capitol. Just three months after the coalition began its campaign, the program was reinstated.

“That was my lesson in life,” she says. “You can sit at home and gripe about what happens to you, or you can get angry, get involved and make the world work for you.”

With that lesson in hand, Murray would begin a career as an elected official, winning first a seat on the Shoreline School Board in the mid-‘80s and then a state senate seat. Then, in 1992, she would ride another wave of anger to the U.S. Senate, where she is currently serving her fifth term.

That year was dubbed “The Year of the Woman” after four women were elected to the Senate, following Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court despite accusations of sexual harassment from his former assistant Anita Hill. Murray and others were spurred to action after watching how Hill was treated when the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee questioned her.