By Gabriel Molina-Kong, 2026 CLA Intern
Election night gave me a feeling that I hadn’t felt since my days playing Macduff in a high school production of Macbeth. It was the feeling of having weeks of preparation culminate in one night when you give everything you have for the audience, or in this case, the electorate. As a candidate, I had to memorize and give a speech, think about the life that candidate Molina-Kong had lived, and talk to people as if I were that man. It’s exactly the kind of character preparation that our director would have us do in my school’s theater program. And just like any high school play, some of the audience was receptive to our performance, and others just sat through it.
At a certain point in the night, I was speaking with Vice Mayor Danny Hang and Councilmember Sabrina Bow, and I embodied my character so well they actually believed that I was the former city manager of Pasadena, had raised $1.8 million, and was really trying to take on the major players that intend to run for County Executive. They kept hitting me with questions that neither me nor my team had prepared in advance, and it was in that conversation (and many others like it) that I saw the positive impact that nine years of improv could have on a career in politics. My team and I had prepared ourselves for what we thought was every possible question and concern that could be raised in a room full of elected officials, but all that prep gets thrown out the window when someone asks you about a department you’re unfamiliar with or a policy you didn’t know existed. It’s like what General Eisenhower once said: Plans are worthless, but planning is essential.
One thing the mock campaign did was give me a reason to talk to everyone in the room and introduce myself. In leading with the campaign, many people were intrigued and then turned their focus onto me because they were interested in knowing the kind of person that would participate in something like that. It made networking feel less stilted and more a natural byproduct of a task that we needed to execute for our campaign. It was an incredibly fun night, but I suppose that’s easy to say when you win.