I Ran For State Senate In Brooklyn And Lost. Here's What I Learned

Ross Barkan as a candidate for State Senate

They don’t prepare you to give a concession speech. Outside of politics, what is the equivalent? You can’t find it in writing, journalism, or teaching—the fields I worked in before embarking on the wonderful, if exhausting, odyssey of running for office in New York City.

There’s nothing quite like channeling 11 months of your life, 15 hours of every day, and all of your hopes and ambitions into a single endeavor with a binary outcome decided on one rather arbitrary day. In politics, you win or lose. The voters choose you or they don’t. And when it’s done you have to acknowledge the outcome—very publicly.

I walked into our campaign headquarters numb on September 13th. Nearly a year ago, on October 3rd, I had stunned most of the people in my life when I launched a campaign to run for State Senate in Southern Brooklyn. The incumbent, Republican State Senator Marty Golden, was the man I needed to dethrone, but first I had to run in a primary against a Democrat backed by all of the influential elected officials and labor unions in my district.

For a long time, I believed I would win. We recruited hundreds of volunteers, raised over $100,000, and hired a campaign team I’m incredibly proud of. We opened a headquarters in Bay Ridge that became a community hub.

And then on September 13th we lost by a little over 2,000 votes to Andrew Gounardes, counsel to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. It was an effort, in hindsight, I take tremendous pride in, but on the night of our defeat I was dazed. Volunteers and staffers were crying. I stood up and somehow summoned words barely churning in a mind that I felt, in that moment, had gone gray and cold. It was over.

Did I want to become a state senator? Yes. Did I worry about entering an arena where many of the participants are egomaniacs, vultures, and oddballs unfit for just about anything other than elected office or clinging, like barnacles, to the political apparatus? Yes.

Politics can change you. You become a public figure. People project their wishes and dreams upon you, and if you are not careful, you will grow drunk on your own hype. Whether you feel it or not, you are performing—dressing better, shaving more, strengthening your handshake, brightening your smile, trying your hardest to be nice to people that, in another life, you wouldn’t necessarily associate with.

You must worry about what you say, because all of it, one way or another, is public record. People will remember what you say to them. Once you step outside, you are officially “on.” If you have 25 pleasant interactions and one that a person felt was negative—perhaps you never smiled enough—they can take it to social media and define you, freeze an impression in time.

Voters on Primary Day, September 13th 2018. (Scott Heins / Gothamist)

Running for office is a life-consuming endeavor. I mean that in every sense of the phrase. If you want to do it and do it well, prepare to wake up at 5 a.m. each weekday and go to a subway platform to talk to strangers. Prepare to knock doors until 9 p.m. and then go do it again the next day. Once you are campaigning in earnest, there is no time for friends or family. There is no watching the Yankees game; there is no “unwinding.” You are sprinting at a pace you never knew, feeling the true force and heat of this city.

I walked subway platforms in 100 degree heat until my legs got rashes and I had to see a doctor. That was right around July 4th. In August, I briefly lost my voice, but got it back in time for the first of two debates with my opponent. Blisters burned on my feet. One morning, half the heel of my shoe came off.

You see more beauty than hate. But you have to be prepared for people to rip up your palm cards in front of you, for racists to tell you the “minorities” get too much in this city, for a man to scream at you for being on his porch, for a woman to blow cigarette smoke in your face and tell you you’ll never win.

You need skin that is not only thick, but impenetrable. You have stop checking Twitter. You have to reckon with the anti-intellectualism that is rampant in some Democratic circles as well as Republican ones, and accept that your service to the community—never mind that you grew up in the district and never left—will be called into question because you did not take a conventional career path to your campaign.

Expect everything. For one woman, I ended up carrying a shambling bed frame out of her house—she signed my ballot petition, though. For another elderly man, I drove him to the hospital after he fell down and cut his head.

You learn neighborhoods on an intimate level, block by block, door by door. You talk to literally thousands of people. You understand the disparity of incomes, the diversity of life on far more consequential terms than you ever would any other way. You can peer into opulent, waterfront apartments and Gatsbyesque mansions. You can enter filthy walk-ups with shattered buzzers, broken doors, and paint last tended to in the 1980s.

You meet the most generous of people. Those who will offer you a bottle of water in the middle of a heat wave and invite you to sit down with them. They speak to you and you become a font for their hopes, their longings—in you they find belief, and that’s a powerful thing.

You learn what it is to fundraise, to comprehend the deleterious enormity of money in politics. Hours on your phone begging for cash, writing emails for cash, eradicating whatever shame you have left and just doing it. Politics killed my sense of shame. Now I will ask, now I will beg, now I can stand on a street corner and pitch myself—this body, this face—for four hours at a time.

I will never brush past another canvasser on the street. I can’t. I was one of them.

I regret nothing about the experience. I would do it again. I am also happy it is done and I can focus again on what it is that brought me here: my words and my ideas.

But whether I like it or not, nothing can ever quite be the same. On the morning after the election, when I felt myself receding from a candidate into a person, a policeman on horseback called out to me as I was trying to cross the street.

“Didn’t you just run for office or something?”

I did.

Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist who ran for State Senate in Brooklyn. He was defeated in a Democratic primary. His debut novel, DEMOLITION NIGHT, which has nothing to do with his campaign, will be out this fall.