Trust, patience led to victory

In August 2005, Lynne Lupien, a young graphic artist and fledgling political blogger from Lowell, scored an interview with Deval L. Patrick, then a little-known candidate for governor. She found him impressive and brave for supporting the Cape Wind project. A few months later, Lupien found herself organizing Lowell for Patrick in the state party caucuses.

Lupien had never attended a caucus in her life. But she learned how to recruit delegates and supporters from the veteran Democratic political hands anchoring Patrick's campaign, attending a regional training session and using a tool on the campaign's website to keep in touch with her recruits. After that, she organized for the state convention and then for the primary, recruiting volunteers, telephoning local Democrats to identify Patrick supporters, canvassing, dropping literature. Despite heavy institutional support for Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly in Lowell, Patrick lost by just 75 votes there on Tuesday, Lupien said.

``They trusted us to do the job," she said. ``They gave us directions. They gave us training. They gave us support. But, in the end, it was our job and our campaign to run in our local community."

Patrick and many of his fans like to describe his campaign as a movement, a groundswell of citizens searching for better leadership and a more participatory government. But his primary win was less a spontaneous phenomenon than a painstakingly built organization, wrought over 20 months with a combination of neighbor-to-neighbor politicking, new technology, and a message of change that resonated with voters inside and outside the political establishment.

To build his campaign, Patrick relied on a battle-tested campaign manager, John Walsh, an insurance salesman from Abington who moonlights as a political organizer at the ground level. A massive man with bright blue eyes and a sandpaper laugh, Walsh's political resume goes back two decades.

In the winter of 2005, Walsh was despairing, he said. For 20 years, he had been searching in vain for a gubernatorial candidate who would build a campaign from the precinct up. He was intrigued when Nancy O'Connor Stolberg, another veteran organizer, told him she had been hired to run Patrick's ground operation.

After Walsh met Patrick, he immediately agreed to help. ``With him, you could sense -- you could taste -- how he could excite people," Walsh said.

The odds against Patrick were significant. Reilly had deep political connections, millions in the bank, and two of the state's best political fund-raisers on his side. At his first meeting with Patrick, Walsh recalled, ``I said to him: `By any traditional measure, you can't win. You need to do something different.' "

Yet Patrick uncovered a desire for change among people like Walsh, Democrats who were deeply invested in the party but who felt a pressing need to change it after 16 years of Republican rule. At the state Democratic convention in Lowell in May 2005, Patrick gave a speech about the need to renew the electorate's sense of hope, urging party members to believe that an outsider could win back the corner office.

``I knew it was going to happen when Deval spoke and the room became silent," Stolberg said. ``You knew he had tapped into what they had been hungry for in that large group of people. I knew then."

Hundreds of conventioneers joined the campaign after that, but Walsh knew he had to find help outside the traditional party, too. What followed, he said, was ``a long slog." Patrick traversed the state, meeting with elected officials and regular people, capitalizing on two points in his favor: his remarkable charisma and the fact that he started early enough to spend significant time talking with people.

``A huge portion of the people who voted for Deval Patrick either met him or heard about him from someone who did," Walsh said. ``That's the advantage of 18 months of really dogged work by this guy."

Patrick sought votes in unconventional places. When the mainstream media was preoccupied with other news, he turned to bloggers, granting interviews to people like Lupien and to Blue Mass. Group, then an obscure political website, now the predominant left-leaning blog in Massachusetts and a powerful pro-Patrick force in cyberspace. When someone from the tiny Western Massachusetts town of Heath -- home of only 143 registered Democrats, according to Walsh -- invited Patrick to speak there, Patrick made the trek. At noon on a Wednesday last summer, 300 people filled the community center there.

``A vote in Heath's worth a vote in West Roxbury," Walsh said.

As the volunteer base grew, time, again, was Patrick's ally. Each event -- the 2005 state convention, the caucuses, a huge town meeting held at Faneuil Hall last spring, the 2006 nominating convention -- gave the newcomers another lesson in the fundamentals of getting large groups of people to do something for Patrick.

The campaign also developed a fund-raising tool on its website that helped overcome its great financial disadvantage by staying in close touch with donors and encouraging them, if they had not reached the $500 limit, to keep giving. The campaign raised more than $1 million over the Internet.

``Everything we do here is one thing more to lift the burden of organization off the campaign," said Charles SteelFisher, the campaign's director of new media.

By Election Day, Walsh said, the mostly amateur activists were more seasoned. Stolberg reported that 39 of the 40 Senate district coordinators had checked in, as instructed, by 8 a.m. The last turned out to be in a hill town with no cellphone reception. Some 12,000 to 13,000 volunteers were helping out across the state.

Walsh likes to say that, if he is running an army, it is not a regiment marching in step, but a company of ragtag revolutionaries.

``Some are behind trees with slingshots, some are [throwing] rocks," he said with a smile. ``The key is, they own it. We trust them."