Seasoned political operatives say they’ve never seen anything like it. Amanda Litman, a top fundraising aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, founded the nonprofit group Run For Something in 2017 to give first-time candidates for local office the tools they need to launch a campaign.

In the last two months, said Litman, roughly 11,000 people have registered with Run For Something to express an interest in a campaign for public office. “We saw January 2021 turn into our best candidate recruitment month yet since launching on inauguration day in 2017,” she said. Their registration total for the first two months of 2021 matched their total for the entirety of 2018—a midterm election year that saw a surge in participation nationwide.

“To me, that in the first two months of 2021, more than 10,000 young people said, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to run for office,’ is quite telling,” said Litman. “We did not think there’d be such a surge in interest, we thought it’d stay at the same scale we were at in 2020.”

Litman also said there’s been an uptick in interest in running for election administration positions, like county clerks, given the “big lie” of a stolen election that swirled around Jan. 6.