question. If you wanted to kickstart a campaign for Congress and win a primary in just a couple of months, do you think you could do it?

I'm asking because last week, I talked to someone who did.

I jumped into this race later than almost every other candidate except maybe the lieutenant governor.

Annalilia Mejia lives in New Jersey.

She's running to replace now governor, Mikey Cheryl, in New Jersey's 11th district.

The reality, just for folks who aren't familiar, the timeline was essentially 10 weeks.

I had the week of Thanksgiving to gather the number of petitions I needed on my petitions in order to qualify for the ballot.

So essentially, on Thanksgiving, I was asking volunteers at that dinner table to collect signatures for me.

I was playing catch-up.

There were 11 candidates.

And this is just the Democratic primary.

Isn't that wonderful?

That's interesting you see it as wonderful. Yes. You could also see it as chaotic.

No, no. When I look at this primary and the number of candidates, to me it's a reflection of an

opening of a system. I think it's wonderful. Anna Leia did have some advantages in this wide open field.

She'd organized for Bernie Sanders.

She'd helped push the minimum wage in Jersey to $15 an hour.

In other words, she knew people.

Still, she was no one's frontrunner.

My strategy was to try to pull out my supporters all the way to 7.59 p.m. on election night.

I was at train stations until 7.30 that night asking people to not forget to vote.

Your primary was really close, so close that on election night, the race was called for one of your opponents, Tom Malinowski, who's a former representative from New Jersey.

...