INTRODUCTION
There Are No Silver Medals in Politics
“Win or lose, Republican Dan Bongino has positioned himself as a rising star in the Maryland GOP with an unexpectedly close contest against well-heeled incumbent John Delaney.”1 This was the text that ran underneath a photo of me and my team in The Baltimore Sun on November 5, 2014, the day after election day. The congressional campaign my family and I had dedicated our lives to for nearly two years was now over. There were no more doors to be knocked on, get-out-the-vote phone calls to be made, parades or county fairs to attend, or speeches to be given. It was all over. I had left every ounce of spiritual and physical energy I had on the political field of play and, despite running against a well-liked and well-funded incumbent who had defeated an incumbent Republican congressman just two years earlier by over twenty points, in a deep blue state, and being dramatically outspent, the race was so close that it was going to be decided by the absentee ballot count over the course of the following days.
Just a few hours earlier, as the clock ticked past the midnight hour, I was tearing up while looking at my wife, Paula, my father, and my mother-in-law, as they joined me in the buzzing hotel conference room we had rented as a campaign night war room. I was overwhelmed by emotion as I was closing in on a dramatic political upset that absolutely no one saw coming. Among the sea of pats on the back from excited supporters and the volunteers glued to computer screens as they anxiously hit the ENTER button on their computers to refresh the Maryland State Board of Elections results page, was my wife, Paula, standing over me as I sat in front of the computer that had just displayed us in the lead by thousands of votes. Thinking that the lead I had taken was nearly insurmountable at this point, with more than 90 percent of the polling precincts reporting results, even the skeptics in the room began to believe that the impossible may happen. Seeing the incredible sense of pride in my father’s eyes and in the eyes of my mother-in-law, who had come to this country from Colombia decades ago with nothing but a dream in her pocket, as we closed in on a victory in the race for Congress in Maryland’s sixth congressional district, was emotionally too much to take after a long two years of emotional highs and lows, and the tears were difficult to hold back.
Not one mainstream political prognosticator had rated the congressional race I chose to enter into as anything other than “Safe Democratic.” When you are the Republican running in that race, this is never a good sign. Compounding the problem was that the local media outlets had ignored our pleas for fair campaign press coverage of the excitement we were generating within the state. The preordained media outcome in the race was so striking that just four days before the election The Washington Post’s Arelis Hernandez declared, in the headline of her piece on the larger Maryland political picture, “In Maryland’s eight congressional races, incumbents face little competition.”2 Despite these headwinds pushing against our campaign’s sails we executed a well-designed campaign plan that I knew would give us a chance, albeit a small one, at victory.
When the polls closed late in the evening, the Maryland State Board of Elections reported the results of early voting within minutes and the results were devastating. Early voting results in Maryland are a generally reliable indicator of how the election is going to go and Congressman Delaney was ahead by double digits. The look on Paula’s face, as she walked back into the room from putting our two-year-old daughter down to sleep in the hotel room and looked at the computer screen, was a mix of breathtaking disappointment and anxiety. She was wondering the same thing I was: “How were we going to tell the hundreds of excited supporters who had gathered in the hotel that we were going to lose badly?” We were both more concerned with their feelings of disappointment than ours because they had all poured their time and energy into the campaign effort. I looked around the room and, as my eyes met the eyes of volunteers and supporters who I had developed personal relationships with as we spent hours knocking on doors and discussing everything from sports to philosophy, it became more and more difficult to disguise my disappointment.
As the early polling precincts began to report their results from the heavily Democratic Washington, DC, suburbs, Congressman Delaney’s lead grew and I began to worry that all of the more than seven thousand doors I had personally knocked on during the campaign had amounted to nothing. Were the political prognosticators correct and had I grossly misjudged my ability to politically persuade people? I knew that the race was a formidable political hill to climb, but I didn’t expect a double-digit loss and wasn’t even prepared to deliver a concession speech under those circumstances. I penciled a few notes on a napkin nearby and they all followed the same theme: how sorry I was for letting everyone down. Ironically, as Paula looked at me and quietly said, “All that work, and we’re left with this,” more results came in from the western and mountain portions of the district and that double-digit lead began to drop. Hours had now passed and the excitement in the packed war room began to grow. We had rented a number of rooms in the hotel for the event—a conference room with some food, a room for my family, and a small ballroom decorated appropriately for either a concession or victory speech—but everyone was packed tightly into the small war room and the hallway outside looking both into the room and over computers and the volunteers’ shoulders for updated results.
At around eleven o’clock at night it happened, although I was skeptical. My friend Brian Terriberry, who had accompanied me throughout the day, forcefully poked me on my shoulder and shoved his cell in my face. On his screen was an Associated Press elections tracker that showed me in the lead by two points. When I looked around the small room and hallway and noticed that hundreds of people were staring at device screens hitting the REFRESH button, all on the same wireless connection, it all made sense. Brian’s smartphone must have been the first device to get the new results and the other computers, including mine were slow to catch up due to the heavy Web traffic. At this point, it began to sink in that we had taken the lead in the race. The mixed martial arts practitioner in me burst out, and in a fit of joy I punched down on the table in front of me in pure joy. Everyone in the room looked surprised and confused, wondering if this was rage or joy. When I screamed, “We’re winning,” the mood turned instantly from nervous anxiety to a blanket of joy so thick with pent-up emotion that you could almost touch it. My Twitter account began to overflow with well-wishes from supporters and astonishment from political insiders who couldn’t believe that we were ahead in a race they had all written off as unwinnable for me. One of the more humorous tweets I saw, from an account using the handle @EsotericCD read: “I seriously don’t understand how it’s possible that Dan Bongino (R) is beating John Delaney (D) in MD06. And yet it’s happening. #crazypills.”
At 12:30 a.m., with 86 percent of the votes in, and my lead at just under 3 percent, I grabbed my campaign manager, Sharon, and said to her, “If we pull this off, I need five minutes.” I wanted to be sure that after my wife and I had an opportunity to digest this moment that I didn’t forget the architect and engineer of the campaign plan that was making this race a nail-biter, against all the odds. I then grabbed my wife, who was standing to the left of the seat I hadn’t left in hours and tightly grabbed her around the waist. It was her innumerable sacrifices that had made that moment possible however fleeting it turned out to be in the end. No one ever prepares the spouses of political candidates for the rigors of a hard-fought campaign and she had never left my side. Although I was overjoyed and new rounds of eye contact with supporters were met by tears and smiles from ear to ear, I noticed that Dylan and Leigh from my campaign team, who had been huddled next to me the entire night doing the tedious electoral math, were not sharing in the moment. Dylan let me enjoy the next few glances and smiles, but then told me the troubling news. He said that the few remaining polling precincts left were largely from the heavily Democratic portions of the district and he wasn’t sure that our lead would hold. The minutes passed excruciatingly slowly as the final votes arrived at the State Board of Elections and were input into the system for the world to see. As those minutes passed and Dylan, Leigh, and I scrambled to calculate the voting math, the results came in before the pencils could process the calculations. We had an erasable SMART Board behind me, which we constantly updated. Phil and Sara, from my campaign team, stole glances at my computer from over my shoulder and updated it from us leading by two thousand votes, to up by a couple of hundred votes, to up by seventy-one votes, to down by seventy-one votes, to down by a couple of hundred votes before the stream of incoming results slowed down. Paula and I were crushed and everyone in the room knew it. It was as if a super-powered emotional vacuum had just sucked all of the positive energy out of the room. The foil of being overcome with joy at our unexpected potential victory and then in minutes having it all ripped away as the final few polling precincts came in, made the experience far worse. I knew there were thousands of absentee and provisional ballots outstanding and if the vote deficit remained within a few hundred votes, we still had a great chance at victory. But as the final precincts came in, we fell behind by a slim thousand-plus votes. The only question remaining, after the most draining emotional roller-coaster ride I had been on since my days in hot zones in the Secret Service, was: “Were there enough outstanding absentee votes from the heavily Republican portions of the district to catch up?”
I owed my supporters who had been packed into that small, hot room for most of the night an update. They had watched me sitting in that chair for hours smiling, crying, laughing, frowning, joyous, angry, frustrated, and finally beaten, and they were owed an explanation. I thanked them profusely and told them it was not going to be decided tonight and that it was probably best that we all went home and prepared for an absentee ballot count, which could take days. I couldn’t escape the thought that the emotionally drained and ill version of me that they were seeing would be the last image of me that would be with them. It’s still this memory of that night that haunts me the most.
Over the next few days I realized the race was over and that the absentee vote count was never going to be enough to overcome now reelected Congressman Delaney’s lead. I genuinely liked the congressman and we had a pleasant conversation on the phone where we both knew that the time for a concession was rapidly arriving. The conversation was made easier by the fact that, although I had been the unwitting star of his barrage of negative campaign commercials for weeks, and was going to lose an unexpectedly tight race at the last moments to him, I thought he was a genuinely good person.
“What could have been?” This is possibly the most painful question anyone can ask upon self-reflection. Looking back on the campaign and the final result is still painful for my wife and me as we both, whether we openly acknowledge it or not, ask that question often. What if we both hadn’t been terribly sick for the final two weeks of the campaign? What if we had just raised a bit more money? What if the local media hadn’t constantly told Maryland voters that the race was “uncompetitive”? What if the national Republican Party had backed our efforts? When you fall short in any effort, which you passionately believe in, you can “what if?” yourself into the middle of a circular firing squad, and it took me some time to stop playing this dangerous game. There are no silver medals in politics and I lost. I’ve accepted that, and this book is my effort to try and generate a positive outcome from a painful event. All of the “what ifs” and the lessons I have learned during my experiences as a police officer, Secret Service agent, and candidate for elected office are the headings of the chapters of The Fight and within each chapter I’ve used personal stories of my experiences as a New York City police officer on the tough streets of East New York, Brooklyn, as a Secret Service agent inside the DC “bubble,” and as a political candidate, to provide concrete, real-world examples. Although my campaign manager and my campaign team designed an incredible strategy, which nearly transformed a universally declared unwinnable race into the congressional upset of the 2014 election cycle, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. The lessons I learned and then how to apply them to a fractured political system were difficult to recount, but maybe there is some nobility in cutting a trail for others to walk on. You decide.
Copyright © 2015 by Dan Bongino