But this election had consumed her lunch hours, nights, weekends and holidays. On Oct. 1, she counted: 1,347 postcards, most of them written at night while her husband was at work and she sat in front of “The Rachel Maddow Show.” They were sent to voters in a neighboring congressional district. She estimated she wrote and sent another thousand in the weeks after that.

Later that month, she took a week’s vacation from her job to go with her husband, Jim, 45, an X-ray technologist, to knock on doors in the district, hundreds of them. They were both brand-new to the game, and they both loved it.

But it meant a lot more nerves on a night like Tuesday.

“I tend to get overly excited about things, and when they don’t happen, get that much more depressed,” she said beforehand. “So I’m trying to think not that far ahead.”

The 2016 election had flipped a switch for her. She felt “sick, like the country was sick,” like things had gone badly wrong. It was not mere partisanship — she had voted occasionally for Republicans before; Mr. Dabruzzo had even voted for Rick Santorum, “before he went crazy.” But the Trump victory was different.

This was the case for nearly all the people at the bar on Tuesday night. Most had done almost no political work before 2016, certainly not knocking on strangers’ doors. Then President Trump came and with it “this knot in my stomach,” Professor Norman said.

The morning after that election, Professor Norman and her husband created the Order of the Phoenix at their kitchen table. It was named after the secret society in the “Harry Potter” books, which was set up to fight the villain, Lord Voldemort. It would go on to have more than 7,000 members on Facebook, including Ms. Dabruzzo, all of whom would write postcards, campaign and canvass in local elections.