Yet for many of the women I talked to Wednesday—the government workers, think-tankers, and nonprofit employees—Clinton isn’t just an aspirational figure, though she’s that, too. Rather, they seemed to see Clinton in the late days of the campaign as something of an avatar, a living representation of their own daily striving against a culture and a professional world that privileges men. When they watch her face “Trump That Bitch” t-shirts, suggestions that she is too frail or weak to assume the presidency, and other examples of blatant sexism, they recall their own, similar experiences. And when they see her succeed, it’s edifying.

Maybe, though, it’s more accurate to describe Clinton as a metaphor, as one volunteer suggested to me between phone calls—“for my grandmother, who didn’t live to see this day” and for “my goddaughter, who’s this tween coming up, and everything in between.” Robin Diamond, 54, said she planted her “I Voted Early” sticker to a 1916 photo of her grandmother in her Girl Scout uniform, a woman who’d marched with the suffragettes before women had the right to vote. “That was really emotional and really meaningful,” said Diamond, who worked for the federal government when Clinton’s husband was in the Oval Office.

The Clinton campaign would doubtless be delighted to hear these women discuss their boss this way. After all, their targeting of women voters this past year has been overt, from frequent mentions of her grandchildren to pointed ads about Trump’s low esteem for women—including one with a girl-power tag line: “Mr. Trump, women are going to be the reason you’re not elected to be president.”

Clinton’s overtures to women have been all the more explicit the last few weeks of the campaign, following revelations about Trump’s treatment and alleged sexual assault of women.

“I guess the bottom line is he thinks belittling women makes him a bigger man. And I don’t think there’s a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like,” Clinton told rally-goers last Monday in swing-state Florida, putting a hand to her heart. “He doesn’t see us as full human beings with our own dreams, our own purposes, our own capabilities. And he has shown that clearly throughout this campaign. Well, he is very wrong. He is wrong about both the women and the men of this country. He has shown us who he is. Let us on Tuesday show him who we are.”

Many, though certainly not all, of the women at Wednesday’s phone bank appeared to represent a demographic Clinton needs: college-educated white women, a voting bloc my colleague Ronald Brownstein predicted in 2015 would be Clinton’s “greatest political strength.” Analyzing then-recent polling from February 2015, he wrote: “The big opening signaled by these polls is her opportunity to recover from Obama’s 2012 trough among college-educated white women. That’s an especially ominous prospect for Republicans because those upscale women have steadily increased their share of the electorate since the 1980s. .... Clinton’s biggest boost over Obama might come from nothing more complex than consolidating her most natural supporters.”