Adam Hattersley says his recently published memoir on his ultimately successful campaign for Florida’s 59th House District in 2018 isn’t exactly a blueprint for first-time candidates, but he says it can be useful for anyone in the private sector considering a run for public office.

“It’s a great place to get questions answered for someone who’s never run for an office before, be it a local, city council race, all the way up to potentially congressional races,” he says about the book, titled Accidental Politician. “If you have any questions, or if you’re just curious about politics, or you want to get involved in local politics, and find out where to go, where to look, it’s a great place to go.”

The 43-year-old Hattersley is a formal naval officer and Iraq war veteran who was born in Colorado and attended the University of Michigan before making his way to eastern Hillsborough County with his wife Christie in 2008. He writes in the book that public service was always important to him and that he had “flirted with the idea of running for politics.” 

In Accidental Politician, he writes that the notion became more serious for him after he became irritated by the jokes about the U.S. that came his way after Donald Trump was elected president when judging a gymnastics event in Taipei, Taiwan in 2017 (Hattersley was a gymnast for 20 years and has been judging gymnastics nationally and globally since 1996).

He then became involved in fellow Democrat Andrew Learned’s run for Congress in Florida’s 15^thCongressional District. It was during that time when he was recruited to run in the Florida House District 59 seat in eastern Hillsborough (which encompasses Brandon and Riverview), and that’s essentially where the book begins (Learned lost in the Democratic primary for that seat in 2018, but rebounded and ultimately won Hattersley’s Florida House District 59 seat last year).

“Fundraising was the biggest challenge for me,” Hattersley told Spectrum Bay News 9 in an interview in Riverview earlier this month. “You get much more comfortable with it with repetition. But it was brand new for me for the state house race. I had minimal lists and contacts, so it was very challenging. You know, the more you do, the more comfortable you get, but it’s never a comfortable feeling.”

He was a political unknown, so it was all about networking and meeting people to expand his base. But looking back after his campaigns in 2018 and 2020, he’s a bit resentful of how intense the focus on fundraising is in running for office.

“If you want to get any press or get any attention or help from outside parties, unfortunately that dollar amount is the first metric that people look at,” he says. “Almost every political interview (or) article that you read about, either the very first line or the last line is their fundraising total. That’s an issue with our current politics. But it’s a giant hurdle for even entering politics.”

He says it’s not just the media who succumbs to focusing excessively on fundraising.

 “You can be the best, smartest person in the world but if you don’t raise money, you won’t get the time of day. So fundraising is definitely an issue. We were obviously able to vastly improve on that in a congressional campaign, but it’s still a major, major problem,” he says.

Hattersley ultimately defeated Republican Joe Wicker for the House seat by three percentage points in the 2018 race.

That’s where the book ends, but Hattersley’s political career continued. He served in the Legislature for two years, and then left the seat to run last year for the Democratic nomination for the Congressional District 15 seat that was then held at the time by Republican Ross Spano. The seat was one that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee truly thought that they could flip blue, in substantial part due to Spano’s campaign finance problems.

But unlike his run for the HD 59 seat, there were other competitive Democrats who were also interested in this election – specifically former television news reporter/anchor Alan Cohn and U.S. Marine veteran Jesse Philippe. There’s no question that Hattersley thought that he was going to win and face Spano in November.

That didn’t happen. 

Instead, Cohn won the primary decisively, taking the seat by eight points over Hattersley. 

“Not going to lie. That was a very painful and disappointing moment,” Hattersley says. “The data was showing us in a much better position. The local support was showing us in a better position. We made the decision to run a very clean campaign which not all of my opponents made, and I thank that that hurt us.”

Hattersley did not endorse Cohn in his general election run against Republican Scott Franklin (who upset Spano in the GOP primary for the seat). Franklin ended up winning it by 10 points over Cohn.

“I made very few personal endorsements, and I did not personally endorse him,” Hattersley says, adding that “I did work in the district to flip it blue.”

Spectrum Bay News 9 reached out to Cohn for comment.

“We understand it was a difficult loss for Adam, but we won the primary in all three counties by 8 points because we worked hard, and Democrats connected with our message,” Cohn wrote in an email. “To continue the claim there was something nefarious about the election sounds a lot like the “Big Lie” right out of the Republican playbook. I prefer to focus on getting Democrats elected in 2022.”

As to his political future, Hattersley says that he’ll wait and see how the redistricting of the CD 15 seat turns out next year before making a decision on whether he’ll undertake another run at that seat. In the interim, he’s working on helping some other local campaigns right now, such as Pinellas Democrat Ben Diamond’s run for congress.