BEFORE the just-concluded polls, Mordi Bimol made a vow: that if he was defeated again at the 14th general elections, he would give up trying to win a seat and look for “a paying job like everybody else”.

“I will be too old to try for a fourth time, and since age is catching up, I would not be employable.

“I need to think of my family too,” Mordi, who plans to tie the knot with his Sabahan fiancé next year, said.

“Three times is enough,” the new Mas Gading MP who, at 33, is one of the youngest MPs in the new Parliament, told Malaysia Decides.

He took two defeats in the 2013 general election and the 2016 state election, which the DAP lawmaker said affected his morale before GE14.

“Even though my team and I worked hard for a year before the election, I wasn’t confident of winning.

“There were many factors. The defeats, all the cheating to ensure Barisan Nasional won, and the short campaigning period, punctuated by my fear to campaign in villages I had perceived to be hardcore BN supporters, got to me,” he said.

On the other hand, Mordi said the results of the 2013 general election buoyed his flagging morale and showed he could win in a straight fight.

In a four-cornered fight in the 2013 election, Mordi had the third most votes, polling 5,293 votes.

The incumbent, former deputy minister for rural and regional development Tiki Lafe, who stood as an independent after he was booted out of BN, polled 6,109 votes.

Tiki’s successor in BN, Nogeh Gumbek, polled 8,265 and Star’s Patrick Anek Uren polled 462 to give Nogeh a 2,156-vote majority win.

Mordi saw hope in the number of votes given to the three opposition candidates, which was over 14,000.

He got the straight fight he had hoped for this election – him versus Nogeh, who had also improved his stature as the deputy minister of agriculture and agro-based industries, to make himself a “formidable opponent”.

Mordi’s 3,024-vote victory, as they say, is history.

“It is so unexpected. A dream,” the former journalist with the Malay language daily, Utusan Borneo, said.

His 2013 adversaries, Tiki and Uren, joined forces this time to power him to victory.

Mordi said the result showed a “mini Bidayuh tsunami” of sorts.

“Even voters from the hardcore BN villages that I feared to go into voted for me.”

He attributed this swing to votes cast in protest against the soaring cost of living, corruption, and the abuse of power by former prime minister Najib Razak and the BN government.

High on his bucket list of things to do is to push to widen and improve the old, twisting Kuching-Bau road. – May 18, 2018.