Here's one to watch

Anyone who wonders what to make of Deval Patrick's gubernatorial bid hasn't talked to him lately.

''The campaign is doing fine," he said last week in a phone interview. ''We have a very strong caucus strategy we're working on; we had 450 people at our women's event last week."

I had called after reading that one of his top consultants, Dan Payne, had left the campaign. Supposedly Payne had left because he didn't want to work with another of the top consultants.

Too many top consultants is a common campaign malady. Patrick said he doesn't think voters care whom he gets his advice from, and he's right. Still, it seemed to be a good time to check in on this unusual campaign.

Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly is the presumptive Democratic front-runner, a phrase that has been attached to his name ever since the last election. He has a solid record in government, which he has deftly converted into a mound of campaign cash.

Frankly, after Shannon O'Brien went down to Mitt Romney the sense was that the Democrats were not awash in options. Legislators seem too unpopular to make strong candidates for governor. The members of the congressional delegation who have flirted with running all seemed to have succumbed to Potomac fever. It wouldn't be fair to say Reilly became the front-runner through attrition, but suddenly there didn't seem to be the usual scrum to tussle with.

Enter Patrick. A former assistant US attorney general, he was an unknown to practically everybody, a candidate no one would have thought of. At first, his candidacy seemed to make sense only to him and Dan Payne.

Patrick has quietly been building a grass-roots operation. He's raised more money than expected, though he's spent it just about as quickly as he's raised it. He's taken tentative steps toward crafting a message, something beyond the original vague notion that people want to ''believe in government again." He's tangled with black ministers over same-sex marriage, and thrown his support behind wind power on Cape Cod.

He makes meeting voters sound like an invigorating experience.

''They're about as disaffected as I thought they would be," he said. ''When they think of politics, they think of two heads on TV screaming at each other. They think of politics as a club that is mostly about money and more about influence than about leadership. That's what we have to turn around."

Voters aren't wrong about the influence of money, even though the idea that the best-financed candidate always wins gives people far too little credit.

Despite his fund-raising successes, Patrick is unlikely to ever catch Reilly, who held a seven-figure lead before Patrick ever got into the race. Patrick has said he has the will and means to spend his own money to close the gap.

I asked how he plans to spend the next couple of months of the race.

''I'm going to talk to people, and I'm going to listen to them," he said. ''I know how important it is to listen and trust the common sense of the Massachusetts people, not just the political wise guys."

The conventional wisdom is that Patrick started too far behind to make a serious run at Reilly. Too many people -- 80 percent, according to various polls -- still don't know who he is, while Reilly has the reputation, the history with the party regulars (seven years and counting in a high-profile job), and all that cash.

It's begun to be tempered though, by a growing sense that those who actually see Patrick are enthusiastic about him. The coda to these conversations is always that, fairly or unfairly, there has never seemed to be as much excitement attached to the workmanlike Reilly.

It's far too early to know what it all means -- but also too early, perhaps, for assumptions about the outcome. Campaigns don't always follow the script. That this one won't is Patrick's ultimate gamble.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.