Erin Gabriel was already pretty busy before Donald Trump was elected president. All three of her children are autistic, and her youngest, an 8-year-old girl named Abby, is also deaf, blind and nonverbal, and suffers from seizures. “She has like 17 specialists,” Gabriel, 39, told me. “She does multiple therapies every week.” Gabriel’s husband is a pilot, and until a few years ago he had a job that took him away from home as many as 20 days a month.

Gabriel’s family, who live in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, have private health insurance but rely on Medicaid to pay for treatments for Abby that her insurance doesn’t cover. “A lot of our life is dependent on policy, Medicaid policy in particular,” she said. So she’s always paid close attention to politics, but her involvement was necessarily limited.

Then came Nov. 8, 2016. “It was terrifying,” Gabriel said of Trump’s victory. She worried about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the return of insurance discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. Her older daughter, who is 11, had been excited to see a woman president, but was picked on by her classmates in their largely conservative area for supporting Hillary Clinton. “It was awful to have to tell her the morning after,” Gabriel said. She let her stay home from school Nov. 9.

Since that day, as Trump’s presidency has confirmed many of her fears, Gabriel has transformed her life. She used to be at home most nights, watching TV. Now she goes to political meetings three or four evenings a week, sometimes with Abby in tow. “I could go every night — there’s always something going on,” she told me. Besides volunteering on local Democratic campaigns, she’s working to coordinate volunteers across campaigns, to make sure they’re deployed to the candidates who most need help.