Melissa Gilbert ran for Congress in Michigan’s Eighth District in 2016. Though she was initially devastated to drop out of the race due to health issues, looking back, the Little House on the Prairie alum thinks it was all for the best—for her life, her happiness, and her marriage to actor Timothy Busfield.
Melissa Gilbert’s Congress campaign took up a lot of her time
Gilbert was asked by Democrat Mark Schauer if she’d be interested in running for Congress after she helped with his campaign in 2014. After lots of thought and talking everything over with Busfield, she decided she wanted to go for it. At that point, she and Busfield had only been married for about 2 years. When the campaign began, she had little time to spend with her husband.
“Knowing the campaign was going to consume much of my time, I imagined running things from the house to maximize the precious free time I did have with Tim,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Back to the Prairie. “Michael [Gilbert’s son] was at college and Time and I were, in many ways, still newlyweds. Alas, two’s company, three’s a crowd, and an entire campaign staff is chaos.”
However, Gilbert was not able to run her campaign from home, which had terribly spotty internet. So she and Busfield spent a great deal of time apart.
Some people on Gilbert’s team were ‘rudely dismissive’ of her husband’s suggestions
Another strain on Gilbert’s marriage was the way Busfield was treated by some of her campaign team members.
“I also didn’t like the way some people on my team were rudely dismissive of Tim’s suggestions,” she wrote. “They’d shoot down his ideas and leave it to me to tell him.”
Busfield hates politics, with or without the respect of his campaign ideas.
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“Not surprisingly, we had some of the tensest moments of our marriage during the campaign,” wrote Gilbert. “At the same time, we shared some experiences that only underscored why we loved each other. Meeting new people with him was a pleasure. If they hated me, they were charmed by him.”
The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ alum could not live the life she lives today had she become a congresswoman
Today, Gilbert lives a happy life of peace and ease in a small cottage in the Catskills with Busfield. She thinks things would be very different if she’d stayed in the race and won.”
“The chickens, the gardening, the shooing of bears, and the rest of country life that awaited me would not have been possible if things had turned out differently,” she wrote. “I have a feeling my marriage might not have survived, either.”
Even so, she says she has “no regrets about the eventual outcome of my campaign for Congress in Michigan’s Eighth District.”
Still, sometimes her mind wanders to what could have been.
“Does that mean I didn’t think about what it would have been like to add congresswoman to my resume? And then perhaps senator? And then… Hey, it’s my fantasy,” she wrote.
The important thing, according to Gilbert is, she “didn’t lose.”
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