Ladies Who Launch
"You'll see the signs :)," Megan Bartlett had texted me as I looked for her house in Geneva, Illinois, a 20,000-person town about an hour west of Chicago. The note seemed vague to the point of useless until I arrived. In a maze of massive greige colonials, Bartlett’s stuck out: It was the only one bedecked with campaign signs for various local Democratic candidates. It was a Sunday morning in October 2018, and I was reporting on Rep. Lauren Underwood, a nurse turned Obamacare expert waging an underdog bid to unseat the district’s Republican representative. Bartlett, a 34-year-old music teacher, had been described to me as “the organizing brain and communications expert” of the grassroots supporting Underwood’s bid.
When I entered Bartlett’s home, I met half a dozen women gathered at the dining room table for breakfast before a day of door-knocking for Democratic
