It’s another kind of Women’s March. A record number of female candidates—575 and counting—are running in primaries or caucuses for Congress or the statehouse in this year’s midterms, more than double the number in any previous election. They are Democrats and Republicans. And the majority have never sought public office. Vanity Fair asked one such newcomer to tell the story of why she suddenly decided to make a run for it.

I’ve been campaigning now for nearly a year, seven days a week. I’ve put 45,000 miles on my car, in a district bigger than New Jersey. But just when I think, I can’t do this anymore—I can no longer live on fried catfish and Clif Bars—I get inspired by remembering a moment that reminds me why I’m on this path.

It was a cold day in February on Capitol Hill. I was with one of the great civil-rights heroes of our time. Congressman John Lewis has gravitas. He can fill a room with electricity. And when he spoke to me, passionately and directly, any doubts I had about the months I’d spent campaigning simply vanished. When I saw what happened in Charlottesville, he confided, it made me cry. I couldn’t believe what the president of the United States said. You have to get up there and lead. You have what it takes to do that. You will have my help, and you will have my support. I realized, right then, that it wasn’t all folly, this idea of running for Congress. In rural Virginia. In a district with Charlottesville at its heart. Challenging three Democratic rivals and then the far-right Freedom Caucus—and the inevitable blizzard of dark money that would descend upon the race. John said he would come with me to walk the streets of Danville, where he had marched in 1963. My campaign was now part of something bigger.

My decision to run as a candidate for Virginia’s 5th District (with its 440,000 voters spread across 308 precincts) traces back to a Democratic Party breakfast of buttermilk biscuits and country ham in the spring of 2017. We were gathered at the firehouse in Washington, Virginia, known as “little Washington” (because big Washington is only 90 minutes down the road). It was April and the coffee was bitter. I was watching our Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, Tristan Shields, belting out a verse of the 1961 hit “Stand by Me.” Tristan had chosen to sing his stump speech rather than speak it. It was a bold decision. Interspersed among lyrics like When the night has come and the land is dark, he had added the odd bullet point, I support re-districting, delivered in a low murmur.

Outside the firehouse doors, a great deal was going on in Virginia politics. Republicans in Richmond were gutting employment law and stripping funding for women’s health. Immigrants in surrounding counties were being hounded by ICE at pop-up roadblocks. Activists, in response, were sprouting, many of them feeling militant. I turned to search for more coffee creamer when our local Democratic Party chair, Ross O’Donoghue, and his counterpart in Fauquier County, Dee Pendley, approached. They had a proposition. Why don’t you run for Congress?

I had never thought seriously about political office. In fact, I had spent most of my 35 years as a journalist holding politicians accountable. Covering the world as a producer for 60 Minutes and a correspondent for Vanity Fair and PBS’s Frontline—often reporting from conflict zones—I repeatedly circled back to Washington to demand answers for a failed war or some misguided policy. But now the Trump administration was busy shredding the institutions that permitted dissent. And once the damage was done, it would be hard to repair. There were plenty of governments around the world, run by oligarchs and kleptocrats, to prove it. I knew that in Rappahannock, Virginia, we would feel it if we no longer had a voice.