Buell is far from alone. George Soros threw in a gripe about Gillibrand in an interview in the spring, and other big donors who liked Franken and loved the way he’d finally let loose in questioning Trump officials continue to burn about it. Gillibrand’s calling for Franken to quit still seems like “a large scalpel to use for what turned out to be no strategic gain whatsoever,” said Ted Gavin, a Philadelphia-based bankruptcy expert who’s on the board of EMILY’s List.

Buell, Soros, and Gavin are among the big donors who didn’t write checks. Many others did.

“I’ve seen women my age really gravitate toward her,” said Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Even if we can’t give as much individually, we’re using our social media to lift up what she says to get other people to donate.”

“It does blow my line that this super-sexist line of attack is the most consistent line of attack on her,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, the political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who’s also spoken out in Gillibrand’s defense. As for the people who’ve been emphasizing the feelings of big donors, Rocketto added, “Maybe some of these people need to come into 2018, the time of online grassroots fund-raising.”

Rocketto is 31. Hogue is 49. Buell is 75. As on many of the issues surrounding #MeToo politics, and really all kinds of politics at the moment, part of what’s in play is a generational divide.

Memory and time can mix up facts. Gillibrand’s calling for Franken to go was without a doubt the watershed moment that quickly led to his resignation, but it came after weeks of revelations buffeting male and female Democratic senators who were trying to get a grip on the #MeToo explosion but also looking to claim the moral high ground as the misconduct allegations against Roy Moore mounted in the Alabama Senate election. Within hours of her statement, made at an unrelated press conference, almost every Democratic senator joined her and said it was time to go.

Read: Senate Democrats call for Al Franken to resign

Several later said they felt they’d moved too quickly, that they’d felt hurried by the reporters who’d rushed them all for answers once Gillibrand took her stand. Several others noted that Gillibrand had just gotten out first, but that many of the other women in the Senate had agreed that they’d speak out whenever the next accusation hit.

But by then, Franken felt that he couldn’t take a chance to reverse his decision and try sticking around.

Also in the past year: The senator appointed to fill his seat is a woman, Tina Smith, who last month won election to the job by a bigger margin than Franken got in his two races. Democrats kept after Trump on his own history of issues with women, and went on to win big in the midterms as a result of an abyss-size gender gap. And Democrats nearly derailed, but definitely turned into a national cause, Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court over Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of an assault in high school. And they did it through the Judiciary Committee, which Franken would otherwise have been a member of, featuring breakout questioning by Senator Kamala Harris of California, who has her spot on the committee because of the opening Franken’s departure created.