As in sports, it’s the close losses that sting the most.
“Oh yeah, it’s a stressful night when you have a roller-coaster-close race like this,” candidate Scott Armstrong said of his bid to regain the Cumberland-Colchester MP’s seat.
“It’s kind of like in sports when I coach, it always hurts worse to lose a close game than to get blown out. But when you look back it’s the close games, even the losses, that you really remember. And we will remember this as one of the best campaigns that we ran. It was just not our turn this time.”
Shortly before 1 a.m., with six polls still to count but trailing by almost 500 votes to Liberal candidate Lenore Zann, Armstrong wasn’t quite ready to toss in the towel. But given the late hour – and the fact his supporters had jobs to go to in the morning – he encouraged those who wished, to take their leave.
But he didn’t want them going with thoughts of regret on his behalf.
“There are very few people in life who get to live their dream,” he told his remaining supporters. “And my dream growing up was to be a member of Parliament.
Armstrong realized his dream by becoming an MP in 2009, an accomplishment “I will always cherish,” he said.
He lost his seat to Liberal candidate Bill Casey in 2015 but neither that defeat nor the one he faced in this election could diminish that earlier triumph
“So, no matter what happens tonight ...whether we pull off the last-second win or we don’t pull off the last-second win, you don’t have to worry about Scott Armstrong,” he told his supporters. “Because there’s some school that needs a principal, there’s a team that needs a coach, there’s a community organization that needs some leadership and some support. So, I’ll be just fine.”
In thanking his campaign team, his supporters and his family, Armstrong also credited his local opponents for their “civility” and for sticking to the issues.