Even Stephen lost, it turned out.

“My sister Mary won,” she said in a 15-minute phone interview with POLITICO on Friday. “Everybody has a really great Irish sense of humor about them.”

It’s safe to say Colbert Busch hopes her nascent campaign for Congress will turn out differently.

With a fundraising hand from her faux-conservative newscaster brother, the Democrat and university administrator is running for a House seat in an upcoming South Carolina special election. The potential general election matchup could be made for comedians like her famous sibling: Colbert Busch is likely to face off against scandal-plagued former Gov. Mark Sanford.

(Also on POLITICO: :Marc Sanford’s confessional campaign)

The district leans Republican, but it’s not a lost cause for Colbert Busch, operatives on both sides say — especially if Sanford is the Republican nominee.

Stephen Colbert has made a go-to routine out of flirting with his own bids for public office — he’s joked about running for president and senator, and his 2012 super PAC raised more than $1 million. But Colbert Busch says her campaign to join the House of Representatives that her brother has mocked so mercilessly is serious business.

“With all due respect,” she said, “I have worked very hard in this district.”

(Also on POLITICO: Stephen Colbert to fundraise for her sister)

She said her experience in the shipping industry and as a business development head at Clemson University makes her uniquely qualified to represent the coastal-based 1st Congressional District.

“This is our time,” said Colbert Busch, who, unlike Stephen, pronounces her last name with a hard “t.”

Though Colbert Busch has never run for public office before, she said she’s long wanted to get into politics. So when former Republican Rep. Tim Scott was appointed to the Senate in December, she decided to take the plunge. She said she caught the political bug at age 6, when her father headed up Physicians for Kennedy.

The candidate and her brother have long been close, part of a large, tight-knit family that used humor to heal life’s pains. And those pains have been considerable.

In 1974, when she was 19 and a sophomore in college, her father and two of her brothers were killed in a plane crash. In 2000, one of her brothers died as a result of illness. And in Sept. 2001, Colbert Busch, then the director of sales and marketing for a shipping company, was working in an office building in lower Manhattan when, across the street, two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center.

Colbert Busch’s first marriage — to a man who was once featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and was eventually convicted of securities fraud — ended in divorce. It left her as a single mom of three children.

The candidate has adopted a philosophical approach to life’s struggles. Her view, a friend said, “is that life is good; life is beautiful; and you just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”