Newton was major league Deval country, to the tune of about 85%. The teller, assistant teller, and credentials officer were all Deval people. So you could say I was in enemy territory. But I don’t like to use that phrase, since everyone was very nice to me, especially the officials. What lovely and dedicated people. They worked their tails off and were unfailingly warm and polite. Even the handful of people who lectured me on why they don’t like the way Chris got into the race were nice. Not like some of the Deval supporters around here!
It quickly became apparent that I would make very little headway in winning votes for Chris. My pitch was, “can I respectfully ask that you consider helping Chris get on the ballot today? We think he deserves a chance to compete.” Usually I got an immediate and vociferous “No!”, to which I would reply genially, “you mean I can’t respectfully ask?” To which they’d say, “well, of course you can, but I won’t consider voting for Chris.” My next line was, “We think Deval is great and he deserves the endorsement after all your hard work. But since that’s a foregone conclusion, would you consider giving Chris one vote, to make sure no one is kept off the ballot?” No luck with that one, either. I did have a couple of people who said they very much wanted to vote for Chris but just couldn’t bring themselves to break their word. These weren’t the kind of conversations where I had the time or the wherewithal to articulate my sincerely held disagreements with the notion of irrevocably pledging one’s voice in a fluid democratic process five months ahead of time. I realized that my main responsibility was to play defense and record the vote accurately.
One retired gentleman had me nervous all day. We had him ID’d for Chris, and by the time I met him he already had on one of our t-shirts. But he told me he was getting a lot of heat from the rest of the delegation and might not be able to hold out. I stuck close to him to try to help counter some of the Deval arguments he was getting. He started referring to me as his “watcher,” and asked that I refer to him not by his first name but as “Mr.” At one point he said his wife had called and told him he had to vote for “Doo-val” or else they would lose all their friends. So when Chris came by, I brought him over to get a pep talk from the candidate himself. (That was when I met Chris for the first time, too.) It turned out he was probably just having fun with me all day! He voted for Chris, but told me afterwards he would have his wife start the car in the morning for the next week, just to be safe.
High-pressure tactics by Deval-ites was a common theme. One delegate we had tagged as a possible Gabrieli vote asked me not to talk to him because he didn’t want the people around him to know he was voting for Chris. But in general I started to feel a lot of respect for the delegates in heavy Deval delegations who were holding the line for Chris. They started to appear to me, fairly or not, as free thinkers among seas of lemmings.
A youth delegate agreed to consider voting for Chris. I told him I’d introduce him to Chris when he came by. But when Chris arrived, I was busy with the older fellow and didn’t see the kid. So just before the voting, when I asked him if he’d come to a decision, he declared for Deval and said petulantly, “I thought you said Chris was coming by,” as if I had blown my chance by not coming through with the candidate. He was probably just messing with me, but still, whadda jerk! He also was one of those annoying people who said “I really hope Chris gets 15%, but I can’t vote for him.” Oh thanks!
I liked all three speeches from the governor candidates very much. Deval’s link between addiction, escapism, and cynicism moved me and I’m still thinking about it. During all of them I also had the same thought I always have during campaign speeches, which is: what does it feel like to set aside the ordinary rules of modesty and to speak so highly of yourself, so publicly? Does it feel like a bit of a loss, a spiritual compromise? Unless you’re a narcissist, it has to, at least at first.
When the voting started, the very first delegate to vote was someone I knew for sure had not signed in and had been marked absent. So, acting on what I understood to be my duty, I called a halt to the proceedings and protested, killing the festive mood. Next thing I know someone is barking in my ear, “Young man, whose campaign do you think you’re helping by doing this??” I turn around and it’s BARNEY FRANK!! He’s right up in my face and not pleased. I point to my Gabrieli sticker and he says, “Well, how do you think it helps Chris’s chances to get 15% if you piss off an entire delegation??” It turns out, the delegate I was challenging is a state committeeman who had been working all day and had arrived for the voting with Barney. I still don’t understand why the guy didn’t just pop by in the morning and sign in – Barney did, and so did Steve Grossman. When I handed the the challenge sheet to Chris’s lawyer after the vote, she laughed and said we can’t challenge HIM.
There were a couple of other little pieces of low-level shenanigans — not exactly dirty tricks, but just the sloppiness that comes with over-confidence. One delegate was a very busy Deval volunteer and didn’t want to bother voting. So, despite having signed in earlier, he didn’t show up, and had an alternate (also for Deval) just step up and insert himself at the time of the vote! When I complained, they scrambled to get the delegate, and let him vote after everyone else was done.
When the voting was over, I checked with Patrick and Reilly’s whips, and we all had the same numbers. I got the binder to the trailer and breathed a big sigh of relief — it had been seven hours, no breakfast or lunch or even bathroom break.
Then the waiting began. I can tell you the mood among the volunteers waiting outside the Gabrieli trailer was tense. We knew it was close. We pumped each other for information from each other’s districts and swapped war stories. Some districts sounded rough, others sounded promising. I scrutinized the faces of the staffers running in and out of the trailer for signs of confidence or dejection — saw only intensity. Brian McQuarrie, Jon Keller and John Henning drifted around, left and came back. The wait seemed ENDLESS. We were sore-footed, hoarse-throated, and light-headed. One person I talked to wondered why, if it was so close, we didn’t just claim victory and force the party’s hand. Word from the trailer later was that it looked good all along, but Chris wanted to be absolutely certain before announcing.
Not long after five o’clock I broke down and got in line for a hot dog — I had to eat something. Wouldn’t you know, just as I’m about to get to the front of the line, the media start to rush toward the trailer. I grabbed a weiner, tossed a $5 bill to the girl behind the register, and hot-footed it over to the trailer area while cramming down the dog. As I wormed out of the media crowd I ran straight into the oncoming mini-rally and got a high-five from Chris which, my mother-in-law tells me, was shown on the evening news, complete with my jaws still working the hot dog.
Chris announced his success to the media and we all cheered and hugged. Milling around the trailer again, a staffer yelled at us to clear the way and show some respect to the winner — Deval and a troop of supporters were marching by us from their trailer to the assembled media and on to the convention floor to announce and celebrate their victory. We stood by as he and his people passed and some of us clapped respectfully.
I wandered back to the floor and thanked the delegates who voted for Chris, and the teller, and chatted again with some Devalies, some of whom were suspicious of the delay and raising conspiracy theories. Soon Phil Johnston announced the results from the podium, and I was shocked to hear so many Patrick supporters boo when the word “fifteen” came out of his mouth.
From my very
biased point of view, then, Chris was the big winner! What an unbelievable feeling of achievement to work so hard and with such uncertainty and to come through with such a tangible result. Don’t laugh — I know my contribution was very small. But for my first volunteer experience beyond holding a sign, it was exhilarating. And think of the stakes: failing meant the campaign was over, done, kaput. With that possibility looming, I can’t describe to you what a complete victory that 15.36% felt like. And now there are months for the campaign to make its case to the primary voters in what essentially begins as a three-way dead heat. As Chris signed off on the phone, “onward and upward!”
If Reilly and/or Gabrieli can rouse their troops and mount an equal or better grassroots effort than Patrick in the primaries… then MORE POWER TO THEM.
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But, if this is going to be another exercise in winning the primaries on “technicalities” and pouring money (from the top) and not even bothering to build their own field game for the primaries. ALL THE WHILE DEPENDING on using the other guys ground game in the general election… then we have a problem.
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If you can’t build your own ground game then you shouldn’t be running.
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If Reilly and/or Gabrieli want respect before and after the primaries then they had better get their hands dirty in the grassroots. Because what is not being said here but IS the elephant in the room is that now neither Reilly nor Gabrieli can win the general WITHOUT Patrick’s ground force.
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The is the cursed part of the blessing left over from Kerry and Dean when the Dean supporters pushed, pulled and and tried to tow Kerry over the line (to no avail)… now all also ran candidates with the blessings of their Dem machinery think that all they have to do is pour money into the primaries and drive up the trailblazers negatives… and lo and behold they win the primaries, but are completely ill-equipped to win the general because they won by just drafting in the other guys wake…
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The leaders are out there trailblazing and forging new paths and the followers are just drafting waiting to overtake, but not adding anything to the mix. That is the difference between a leader and a followers. As Democrats we need to start electing leaders… not guys who just show up when it is convenient when all the hard graft is done by someone else and they show up just in time to reap the benefits…enough is enough.
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Now if Gabrieli puts together a first rate groud team then again more power to him and he has all of my blessings to do so… but if all he is going to do is pour money in from the top to drive up Patrick’s negatives… well…what the hell kind of leader is that…that is just a parasite????
Excellent Post TrueBlueDem
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“the elephant in the room….”…
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I’ll be curious to see if Gabrieli’s fundraising numbers go up.
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Who – if any – of the reps who supported him will also give money to his campaign?
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It will be interesting to see if while he is spending millions – he ends up with less than 500 $$ donors.
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Anyone know how many people have contributed to him so far?
Gabrieli had 480 donations totalling $152075. More importantly, he spent 2.8 million of his own money to get himself on the ballot. In comparison, Reilly had about 4000 donations totalling $1.33 million plus $50000 of his own money and Patrick had about 8500 donations totalling $1.66 million plus $45000 of his own money.
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Really, why would Gabrieli bother building up a warchest when he already is willing to pour in 10-20 million of his own money? Practically, it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Even Patrick, who’s a rich man by practically every standard, isn’t in the Gabrieli/Romney level of wealth where spending 10 million of your own money is an easy thing to do.
Because really, with so much talk of his personal resources, there is not a lot of incentive for people to contribute, other than to show symbolic support.
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And it’s a great advantage to be able to spend less time fundraising and more time campaigning. I think that’s what we’d like for all our politicians.
Reilly and Gabrieli will have ground organizations, but they will never match Deval on that score. He’s made that his whole game, which is fine. But there is more to an election than the ground game alone. Aside from resources and media coverage, there is the simple fact of what the voters think of a candidate’s experience and positions.
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And if Reilly or Gabrieli win the primary, it will not be the Patrick-built field organization alone that allows them to beat Healey. It will help, and it will make Deval a major force in state politics moving forward, the way Howard Dean was able to take over the DNC. But they’ll win the governorship as much by taking back 2002 Romney voters than by bringing new voters in.
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Deval supporters have been saying that it’s a mistake to call him the liberal candidate. Maybe so, though it’s debatable. It is true, though, that the great majority of his active supporters are from the left. I have a hard time seeing those folks – decent and committed as they are – succeeding in personally bringing over those who were willing to vote for Romney. The cultural and ideological gulfs to be overcome are too wide.
Gabrieli, who is just as far to the left as Patrick, if not more so, is more electable because he doesn’t have support from the left this time around? Disingenuously saying “Gosh, I think Patrick is way more liberal than Gabrieli,” when you’re actively backing Gabrieli and supposedly know his stances is silly. As Gabrieli starts campaigning in earnest (since in all honesty, he’s barely started), he’s going to be “outed” as a liberal as we all know he is. I have no problem with liberals and I personally like and respect Gabrieli, but if your argument is that the average Dem wants a guy less liberal than Deval, they’ve only got one option in this primary race: Tom Reilly. I think Reilly and the Republicans will both be able to get that message out by September.
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Honestly, if Gabrieli had come out a year ago and actually shown interest in running for Governor when the serious candidates were all coming out and creating their agendas, I might have been a supporter of his because he’s a progressive liberal and a smart guy who has traditionally supported a lot of candidates and causes that I believe in. But I’m honestly not sure how having support from the party apparatchiks makes him a better candidate than Patrick.
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If anything, what DOES make Gabrieli a stronger candidate is that he’s willing to blanket the media with his message. That’s a powerful tool in a general election or a general primary. So far, that has been the basis of his success in polling, but he’s been unopposed in media spending and hasn’t had to deal with the Republican media machine that ran him and O’Brien over four years ago.
This rhetoric –
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“if Gabrieli had come out a year ago … party apparatchiks …” etc.
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– is no longer relevant to the race. You’re not going to win over undecided voters by talking about when Chris got into the race, or how Deval’s party support is less insider-y than Tom’s or Chris’s.
But you really don’t think this will be an issue? “My opponent decided to buy his way onto the ballot at the last minute and those insider Democrats made a back-room deal to get him on the ballot.”
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Tom Reilly’s been trying to separate himself as not being a complete insider. Patrick’s been the consumate outsider in his campaigning. And even if neither of them use it, Healey will. I don’t think this issue will win voters for any candidate, but I think it could keep them home in September or November and Gabrieli put it out there.
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Part of the reason that MA keeps voting for Republican governors is that they feel state government needs balance and doesn’t need to all be controlled by the same entrenched Democratic dealmakers. This is one of the central Republican talking points along with tax cuts in Massachusetts. And even though I think it’s BS, a lot of voters seem to disagree with me.
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Getting Gabrieli on the ballot was an important first step for his campaign, but he now has to prove at least three major things:
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1) He isn’t beholden to the people who made inside deals to get him on the ballot and has significant support outside of the millions that he pours into his TV ads.
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2) He won’t be pigeonholed into being a liberal once his full platform is out in the public (and, yes, Deval has the same problem).
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3) He’s learned something about being a flag-bearer since 2002, when his Democratic insiderness and political experience didn’t mean a hill of beans in attempting to beat Mitt Romney. It’s harder to be seen as a winner once you’ve been a loser at a top office.
I think it’s hard to paint a self-made entrepreneur as a party insider, despite all Chris has done for the party. Here are responses to your points:
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1. I don’t believe “inside deals” were cut, and I haven’t seen any evidence suggesting otherwise. As my post indicates, the vote pretty much lined up with what Gabrieli’s campaign had projected in the weeks leading up to the convention, based on contacting delegates and soliciting support from elected officials, unions, etc.
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2. I think Gabrieli is much less susceptible to the “liberal” caricature than Patrick, for one reason, as I tried to explain above, because many of the people knocking on doors for Deval really are leftist activists. If the same guy who tried to get your selectmen to vote to impeach president Bush is now asking you to vote for Deval, you’re going to assume Deval is the lefty candidate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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Second, if progressivism is about smart, effective government and social liberty, I think Gabrieli will primarily be associated with the former category. See his announcement today.
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3. Gabrieli didn’t run against Mitt Romney, Shannon O’Brien did. And lots of successful politicians lost their early campaigns. This is why I think Deval will hold a very high office one day, even if he doesn’t make it past September in this race.
Not quite.
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But if Gabrieli’s “Whole game” is to “Throw the baby out and KEEP the bathwater”.. (ie run a campaign strategy on driving up Patrick’s negatives in order to win the primary thus “inheriting” Patrick’s ground force for the general) then Gabrieli actually has No Game… he is just a drafter.
I don’t know where you’re getting that Gabrieli’s strategy involves going negative on Deval. So far it’s been an entirely positive campaign and I expect it will stay that way. Some Deval folks seem to perceive all support for other candidates as direct attacks on their guy.
While you make a good point about the need for Reilly and Gabrielli to work on their own grassroots effort in order to carrry them through the general election if either does eventually win the primary. However, what few people know is that Jeremy Hastings, who was Kerry’s NH Field Director is now Reilly’s field director. I had the pleasure of working with Jeremy as an intern in NH in the summer of 04, and have all the confidence in the world that if given the proper resources, there is nobody better suited to build a formidible field operation than Jeremy Hastings. Through building off of the Primary organization Kerry had in place, AS WELL AS (but not by any means exclusively) Dean’s Primary organization, we were able to make NH the only state to go from red to blue….in mo small part due to the efforts of Jeremy Hastings. For this reason, along with several others, while I haven’t yet decided whether or not I’d vote for Tom Reilly, I most certainly would not rule him out as a formidable opponent, both in the Primary election as well as in the General election.
I like that your inexperiance came through on Saturday. Not because you made a few mistakes, but because they shouldn’t have been mistakes. You played by the rules, and when they were bent, you called out the system.
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Everybody must check in. Everybody must vote for themselves. All people should be equally subject to challenge. Barney Frank is a pragmatist (and seemed sour on Saturday) so I understood his questioning, but it still irks me that the process isn’t completely respected by everyone.
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So, kudos to you for writing down the places where the smooth politicing branch of thought shows your inexperience in the wrong, but the do it by the book because this is an official election branch of thought shows you to be in the right.
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Completely unrelated,
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blockquote>These weren’t the kind of conversations where I had the time or the wherewithal to articulate my sincerely held disagreements with the notion of irrevocably pledging one’s voice in a fluid democratic process five months ahead of time.
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Is the trouble with making the pledge, or keeping the pledge. I have no problem with people deciding to keep the pledge — you gave a room full of people your word. Whether or not you think people should give their pledge — well, that’s another story. But, if you were at a caucus and nobody would pledge support for candidates, how would you choose which delegates you wanted representing you? Ask them their opinion on assorted planks of the platform? Ask them who they voted for guv in 2002? It’s difficult to find a reasonable criteria.
On the second point, and maybe I’m being impossibly naive here, not being intimately familiar with the caucuses, but is it impossible to get elected as a delegate simply based on experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, general political orientation, etc.? Has everybody at a caucus already made up their mind, and do they have to insist that all their delegates have too? With Deval’s big victory at the convention impending, a lot of people were raising up the delegates as the democratically ideal “voters.” But party process voting is not under the purview of the constitution. Imagine if, in order to register to vote in a government election, you had to swear allegiance to a particular candidate. Wouldn’t that completely corrupt the process? The nomination process is what it is, but it shouldn’t be held up as democratically ideal by the same people who want it all fixed in place five months before the convention.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the locality and on the level of organization of various campaigns in that locality.
You’re absolutely right about the first one. I didn’t put myself in that delegate’s shoes. The real problem was that with my inexperience, at stressful moments I couldn’t keep enough things in my head at the same time, like remembering that I had a second delegate who wanted to meet Chris.
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As for the vote, well, I wasn’t in the counting room or privy to the conversations between the campaigns and the parties. So the counting itself isn’t transparent, but certainly each campaign has a very good idea of what the initial vote from the floor is. For example, as soon as the voting was over, our whips found through talking to each other that we had beaten our projections in some districts and narrowly missed them in others. So we were definitely right around 15%, and that’s how it turned out.