These two events — an unexpectedly competitive Eighth District election and a rare labor action by teachers — are connected. Partly this is because Lesko is a villain to many local champions of public education. I met Ratti as she prepared to go canvassing for Tipirneni; she told me, “Lesko has been an advocate of vouchers and privatization and pretty much anything she can do to destroy the public school system.”

But there’s a deeper link. Both the walkout and the surprising viability of Tipirneni’s campaign are manifestations of the explosive activist energy, particularly among women, set off by the catastrophe of Trump’s election. Since Hillary Clinton’s defeat, “college-educated women have ramped up their political participation en masse,” the historian Lara Putnam and the political scientist Theda Skocpol wrote in a recent article, “Middle America Reboots Democracy.” It’s this civic renewal that is transforming politics in Arizona.

Speaking to activists here, I was struck by how similar their stories were to those I’d heard last year while reporting on a special congressional election in Georgia’s Sixth District. In both places, women who were once politically disengaged felt demeaned by Trump’s victory. Overcome by a need to do something in response, they’d turned to local politics, which had gradually come to consume their lives.

Save Our Schools, a prominent grass-roots organization supporting the walkout, is an outgrowth of an Arizona group called Stronger Together, which itself is a spinoff of the pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. Dawn Penich-Thacker, one of the founders of Save Our Schools, once served as a public affairs officer for the Army, and compared the relationships among the state’s newly minted activists to the bonding she experienced in the military. “It’s the deepest friendship,” she said.

She introduced me to Jaclyn Boyes, whom she met when Boyes started a petition demanding that Arizona’s Republican senator Jeff Flake hold a town hall. After Trump’s election, Boyes told me, she had the desolate sense that “half of my country doesn’t like me because I’m black.”