Democrats plan Mass. rebuilding
Party will hold caucuses to woo members
Its activist base withering and its membership in decline, the Massachusetts Democratic Party will hold local caucuses this weekend, launching a nine-month effort to win its first gubernatorial election in 20 years. For the state's dominant party, there is no razzle-dazzle in the game plan, just the intention to rebuild from the ground up.
Fewer party faithful than in past years are expected to attend the town and ward caucuses, where they will select delegates for the June endorsing convention. Democratic leaders say they will use the gatherings to recruit foot soldiers for a revitalized field organization in the fall campaign against the Republicans. A priority will be reaching out to younger voters.
''The bedrock of the party, the World War II or 'greatest generation,' is dying and being replaced by younger people, many of whom are absolutely determined not to participate in any organized partisan political activity," said Secretary of State William F. Galvin, a Brighton Democrat and frequent critic of what he calls the party's ''obsession with minutiae and rules."
State party chairman Philip W. Johnston estimated that about 25,000 to 30,000 activists will participate in this weekend's caucuses, down from about 50,000 four years ago. An estimated 100,000 took part in 1982.
The declining participation in party exercises like this weekend's caucuses is a sign that, even in the land of the Kennedys, the Democratic Party is struggling with the same issues of relevance that plague it nationally.
Whether a sign of the declining influence of institutions or a larger civic disconnect, it is part of a broader trend. Studies nationally have shown a decrease in enthusiasm for politics, said Kay L. Schlozman, political science professor at Boston College. ''We've gotten more educated, but at the same time we've become less engaged," she said.
Despite the Democrats' overwhelming dominance in the Bay State -- the biggest all-Democrat delegation in Congress and a nearly 7-1 majority in the Legislature -- party activism has declined since the early 1980s. Democratic Party registration has dropped from 46 percent in 1980 to 37 percent today.
Perhaps even more telling is the precipitous drop in the level of participation in party primaries and caucuses.
From a high-water mark in 1982, when nearly half of Democrats and independents voted in the Edward J. King-Michael S. Dukakis governor's rematch, turnouts in the last three Democratic gubernatorial primaries have barely exceeded 20 percent of eligible voters.
Since defeating the conservative King in 1982, the liberal wing has retained control of what remains of the party apparatus.
A center-right faction blames the liberals' dominance for Democrats' failure to win the corner office. The party, they say, is perceived as too liberal and too preoccupied with social issues to win independent swing voters, who now make up about half the state's electorate.
''The Democratic Party is out of step with the average working man and woman in the state," said Worcester Sheriff Guy W. Glodis, a former Democratic state senator from Auburn.
The emphasis should be on public safety, education, economic development, and job creation, not same-sex marriage and abortion rights, he said.
In response to the defeats at the top of the ticket, the party is going back to the future, trying to build a ground organization by recruiting captains for each of the state's more than 2,100 precincts.
The problem the party faces was evident earlier this month when 100 or so activists met at the Hibernian Cultural Centre in Worcester, the first in a series of organizing rallies around the state. Besides party affiliation, gray or thinning hair was the most common trait for those in the hall.
''We need more people of color and more people who have not been involved before," US Representative James P. McGovern told the crowd, pausing to add: ''And we need to get more young people involved."
The average age at the event was well above 50.
Democrats will need a lot of volunteers like Anne Stevenson, who stood out at the Worcester rally. She was the one with a 3-year-old child in her arms. A single mother and full-time college student, Stevenson was one of maybe a half-dozen adults there who was younger than 30.
The 29-year-old recently became interested in politics, with the passion of a religious convert. She drove 45 miles in the rain with her son, Reece, from her home in Somerville to the rally in Worcester.
Despite the demands of motherhood, a part-time job, and her course load at Tufts University, where she's enrolled in a program for older students, she has made time to volunteer in campaigns, from John F. Kerry's presidential race to local legislative contests.
''I didn't care about politics until I realized how much it affects me on a daily basis," Stevenson said. Her political awakening occurred after she became pregnant, went on Medicaid, and endured impersonal, second-class prenatal care, she said.
Volunteers like her represent a return to the basics of field organization, a step the party is taking after more than two years of soul-searching following the fourth consecutive loss in a governor's race in 2002.
The Democratic National Committee is helping, with $150,000 that allows the state party to double staff from four to eight for this election year.
Three new employees are regional organizers; the fourth manages the party's voter database.
After the 2002 debacle, Johnston came under fire, but he won praise for the party's key role in withstanding a well-financed Republican challenge to Democratic lawmakers in 2004 and picking up three more seats in the Legislature.
Although the party is stepping up its field operations, Johnston, elected chairman in 2000, insisted that the party's role is limited in the top-of-the-ballot races.
''The [campaigns'] strategists make their own decisions about what the candidates' messages will be," he said. ''What the party can do is have a strong field organization that supports all the Democratic candidates."
This year, however, the state committee plans to raise and set aside at least $1 million to help support the Democratic candidate after the September gubernatorial primary, Johnston said, whether the nominee is Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly or Deval Patrick, the former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton Department of Justice.
Likely to face a wealthy, self-funded Republican -- either Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey or businessman Christy Mihos, a Republican who has not ruled out running as an independent -- the Democrat may still be heavily outspent in the seven-week general election campaign.
The party plans to begin raising the money in March, earlier than ever before, to prepare for the fall campaign.
The most common theory to explain Democrats' failure to win a governor's election since 1986 is that an increasingly suburban and independent electorate doesn't want a return to the one-party monopoly of the 1980s.
''There's a perception that the Democratic Legislature is not just out of touch, but almost immune to change," said William G. Mayer, political science professor at Northeastern University. ''The easiest way to restrain their excesses is to elect a Republican governor."
After Shannon P. O'Brien, then state treasurer, became the fourth Democratic nominee in succession to lose to a Republican, the party conducted an extensive post-mortem to determine why Republican Mitt Romney prevailed.
A series of hearings around the state confirmed the dominance of the party's liberal wing. Even though some critics within the party worry about its liberal stances, by a 3-to-1 margin, activists urged the party to move leftward, not to the center, according to an analysis of the testimony before the party's Election and Outreach Committee.
The top recommendation, yet to be implemented in a statewide race, may be the most challenging: ''rebrand and communicate the Democratic Party's fundamental values," rather than a laundry list of specific policy positions.
The report also recommended boosting turnout in urban areas and speaking with ''one voice."
Emulating Republican discipline on communication may be a pipe dream for the fractious Democrats, some of whom invariably break ranks each cycle. In 1990, liberals and women bolted, helping Republican William F. Weld beat John R. Silber. Four years later, wholesale desertions propelled Weld to a historic landslide reelection over Mark Roosevelt. In 1998, lunch-bucket urban Democrats went over the wall to help Republican Paul Cellucci defeat Democrat Scott Harshbarger.
Dukakis is a leading force behind the return to field organizing, a hallmark of his statewide campaigns in another era.
''My rant on this, and it's not just Massachusetts, is that Democrats have forgotten what it means to organize at the grass-roots level, and I don't mean parachuting kids in before the election," Dukakis, teaching this semester at the University of California at Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview.
He rejects the notion that people today are too busy or too removed from politics to invest that much effort. ''This is not too complicated, going to people's doorsteps, into their homes and connecting with them," he said.
For Massachusetts Democrats, the rally in Worcester was a good place to start. Nowhere else is Democratic slippage more evident than amid the scenic hills and changing demographics of central Massachusetts.
Once dependably Democratic, even outperforming the party statewide, the big county has become reliably and increasingly Republican in the last four gubernatorial contests.
In 1990, Weld narrowly beat Silber there by fewer than 1,000 votes in the county, but in 2002, Romney rolled up a 40,000-vote margin over O'Brien and swept 59 of 60 communities, losing only the city of Worcester.
The self-examination after 2002 also produced an overhaul of procedures for the party's conventions. In election years, these tend to be unwieldy, torturous marathons, with a cast of thousands.
This year, the endorsement balloting will be shortened and consolidated, and the number of delegates and alternates will be trimmed by more than a quarter, from nearly 9,000 in 2002 to no more than about 6,400 this year.
''We are the biggest convention in the country, bigger than California in terms of our state convention, which is kind of crazy," said Susan Fenochietti Thomson, executive director of the state party.
Apparently immune to streamlining, however, is the Democratic State Committee itself, now grown to 370 members. The committee conducts debates on party issues, bylaws, and policies. Advocates call it representative and inclusive; critics think it is political correctness run amok.
Besides ex officio elected officials, lifetime members, and elected committee members, the party website identifies other members appointed under the following categories: 33 affirmative action, 10 labor, 10 gay/lesbian, 27 gender balance, two veteran, two disabled, two senior citizens, two French-speaking, two Portuguese-speaking, and 15 youth (''having not reached the age of 36").
In that last category, Johnston, who is 61, said the party is still struggling to enlist younger voters.
''I'm not happy where we are on that front," he said. ''I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe another Jack Kennedy will appear." 