225 Days
This wasn’t a win. It was a decision, made over and over again, not to walk away.
The wind is blowing. The sun is already doing too much for this early.
The grounds crew at Rockhurst is dragging the field back into order, slow, methodical, like nothing urgent ever happened here.
And then that sound. The crack of a bat. Sharp. Clean. Unbothered.
Like my world didn’t just hold its breath Tuesday night.
It’s Thursday now.
And everything is supposed to feel settled.
225 days.
That’s how long we lived inside this.
On Tuesday night, Kevin won the mayor’s race in Independence.
Cody was the top vote getter for city council.
If you weren’t in it, you’d think it made sense.
You’d think it unfolded the way it was supposed to.
It didn’t. Campaigns never do.
Our campaigns looked like one person holding too many roles and pretending that was normal.
Like switching between finance, comms, field, and strategy without ever fully setting one down.
Like answering a question about messaging while also wondering if there was enough money to make it to the next mail drop.
It looked like being the finance director and the comms director and the social media director and the political director.
Plus the interns.
Ok. It was me. I was a determined, disciplined, caffeine fueled menace.
It looked like Cody carrying his brother into rooms that didn’t know his name but felt his presence anyway.
Like conversations that went a second too long because people were deciding, in real time, whether they believed him.
And it looked like Kevin sitting with decisions that didn’t have a clean answer.
Reading everything. Asking more questions. Sitting with it longer than anyone wanted him to.
Trying to hold onto who he is while also taking in information that could pull him in a different direction.
There were nights where the conversation didn’t end clean.
Where you could feel the weight still sitting there after everyone stopped talking.
Where the right decision didn’t feel good. It just felt… necessary.
There were calls I didn’t agree with.
Not in theory. In real time.
And still, they were the right ones.
That’s the part people don’t see.
Not the disagreement.
The discipline.
The willingness to choose something harder because it holds up when it counts.
That’s leadership when it actually costs you something.
It looked like Kevin standing in front of people without trying to be untouchable.
No script to hide behind. No distance to protect him.
Just answering the question that was actually being asked, not the safer one.
And people responded to that.
Not all at once. Not all the same way.
But you could feel something shift.
You could feel it in the way conversations got quieter when he answered directly.
In the pause before the next question came.
In the moment someone stopped pushing and just nodded.
That’s where it showed up.
Not in a line.
In a reaction.
That’s what he won.
It looked like trust getting built in inches.
And almost breaking in seconds.
It looked like hard calls made in parking lots.
Like someone saying “we’re doing this” and everyone else nodding even if they weren’t sure it would work.
It looked like late nights that didn’t really end.
Early mornings that came anyway.
Conversations that followed you home whether you wanted them to or not.
It looked like small.
Too small, sometimes.
And still… people stayed.
Because this is where it actually hits.
Where people decide if any of this is real or if it’s all just something happening somewhere else to someone else.
And you could feel that weight in every room.
Tuesday night wasn’t a celebration first.
It was that moment when your body realizes you can finally unclench your jaw.
When you look at each other and don’t have to say it out loud.
We made it through.
And then it was the three of us in the car.
Kevin. Christina. Me.
A beat.
A look.
And then all of it broke at once.
Not graceful. Not composed.
Just loud, unfiltered, borderline unhinged laughter and something close to a scream, like a scene that would’ve been cut from The Office for being too real. I will remember it for the rest of my life.
Because that’s what it actually felt like.
Not victory.
Release.
Not “we did it.”
More like, “are you kidding me, we actually did it?”
Not perfectly. Not cleanly.
But we didn’t walk away.
And the truth is, we could have.
It would have made sense, at least once.
That’s what makes it real.
That’s the campaign.
We Build Anyway.
jess