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>I Ran for Congress. I Lost. I'm Persisting. Quitting Is Not an Option in the Trump Era.
And I would love to tell you that we all won. In the movies, the underdog always wins. The Death Star always explodes. Carrie always walks into the sunset with Mr. Big. But reality has somewhat different odds than Hollywood. In a congressional race, the person spending less money wins only 9 percent of the time. You have less than 15 percent chance of beating an incumbent—and those odds are way worse if you’re running for the first time.
The rules of probability cannot bend, and many excellent women candidates lost this year. In California, volcanologist Jess Phoenix lost her bid for Congress. Former intelligence analyst Alexandra Chandler lost in Massachusetts as well as research administrator Sabrina Heisey. And always being one for good company, I lost my race too.
For a first-time candidate who raised under $200,000, I did a fantastic job. I got almost 25 percent of the electorate, with over 17,000 people voting for me. I sometimes try to imagine 1000 people telling me they believe in me enough to be their congresswoman, and it’s overwhelming. 17,000 people believing in you isn’t a loss, it’s an excellent start to a career. The guy I was running against has a 20-year head start.
Why did I lose? It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself honestly. The truth is, you cannot run a political campaign like a tech startup. Technology is a field that fetishizes disruption. The old ways are suspect, and we place an almost irrational trust on new tools. That’s fine for developing games, but it was a failing playbook for politics.
There’s no way to “disrupt” the shoe-leather work of shaking hands and listening to people. I was more comfortable in the digital world, but I needed to spend my time in the real one. As the candidate, I could hire someone to produce ads, but only I could raise the money to pay for them. I needed to spend more time raising money and more time spending it.
I find all this energizing rather than discouraging. Running a campaign isn’t just more complicated than I expected, it’s delightfully more complicated. I come from engineering, and failure is an expected state. For 2020, I know what went wrong, and now I know how to fix it.
And make no mistake, every woman that ran this year had successes that can be built upon. Now, I know organizers at every Democratic Town Committee. I know how to get on the ballot. I know how to file an FEC report. I know how to canvas neighborhoods.
If women are looking to replace men at the top levels of leadership, we can expect politics in all its glory, loss and heartbreak included. Careers are not built in a day. One political loss is not the end, and even wins are ephemeral. Creating an equal world for women was never going to be a one-election task.
Make no mistake. There are massive networks of women candidates forming, supporting and teaching each other. And these networks won’t disappear after a single election. Losing any single battle is not losing the war. Studies show if a first-time candidate loses, our odds skyrocket is we run a second time.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned from running is that there are no perfect candidates in politics, just candidates. In this field, the only heroes are the ones that do not give up. I plan to persist.