Patrick certainly did well in my caucus in Amherst (perhaps the most liberal town in the state).  About 70 people showed up and only one expressed any preference for Reilly.  We elected 20 delegates to the June state convention, essentially a slate pre-arranged by the Patrick campaign but including many members of the town Democratic committee.  Several delegates-to-be spoke in favor of John Bonifaz, a voting rights activist and author who is challenging incumbent Democrat Bill Galvin for Secretary of State.

It was quite a contrast with the caucuses four years ago when about 300 people showed up to support Robert Reich, who was just putting his campaign together and needed a big effort to get 15% of the delegates.  (Candidates for the general are chosen in a September primary -- the only legal effect of the June convention is that you need at least 15% there to get on the September ballot.)

The only other statewide candidate with an organized presence was Tim Murray, the mayor of Worcester who is running for Lt. Governor.  After the weirdness involving Marie St. Fleur last week, none of the (four?) Lt. Gov. candidates have ties to either Reilly or Patrick (though Murray was annoyed in public that Reilly sought another candidate after an earlier expression of his intent to remain neutral).

It's already clear what the spin will be -- Patrick will trumpet his statewide organization, and Reilly will claim that these are activists rather than representative voters.  There is no chance of either falling below 15% , particularly as Reilly will be strong among the "superdelegates".

Anybody else have a report from another town in MA?

I wanted to plug this report of an Elizabeth Edwards speech in North Carolina, now a recommended diary at DKos.

Edwards is still the 2008 candidate that excites me the most, but he never seems to break the 10-15% barrier even among the activist polls here.  I want someone out there making the moral case against Bush and his whole party.  The naked financial corruption is just the most obvious part of it, and the easiest to sell.  The overall domestic theme of this adminstration is that ordinary people don't matter.  Can we make that case?

Today's Boston Globe has two stories on the Democratic race to succeed Mitt Romney as governor:

Patrick has raised more money than Reilly since July, though Reilly still has much more cash on hand.  People fundraising for Patrick include Obama, Robert Reich, Vernon Jordan, and Kitty Dukakis.  Patrick also has significant available personal money, unlike Reilly.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin rules out a run for governor, citing lack of money to compete with Reilly and Patrick.  This increases Patrick's profile but eliminates the possibility of splitting the opposition to him.

Romney has not announced his plans but has implicitly pledged to do so this month.  The Globe seems to be treating Healy, the lieutenant governor, as the likely GOP candidate.

Via kos, here is the latest State House poll on the MA governor's race.  Romney's favorable/unfavorable has dropped from 54-37 to 47-43 since September.  He trails (AG Tom) Reilly by 36-52, (SecState Bill) Galvin 41-46, and leads (former US atty Deval) Patrick 42-40.  (Note that Galvin is not yet a declared or particularly active candidate.)  All three Dems crush Lt. Gov. Kerry Healy (25-56,28-49, 32-44).

Some of the comments on the Kos thread address the state of Patrick's campaign -- the claim is that he is raising adequate money but spending it fast developing a campaign infrastructure.  To get on the primary ballot he needs 15% or more of the vote at a June convention that will be packed with activists -- this seems not too difficult a hurdle comapared with expanding his name recognition to compete with Reilly in the September primary.

Romney has pledged to reveal his plans "during the fall".

Update: Globe columnist Adrian Walker has this sympathetic look at the campaign in today's paper. I think it's a promising sign that Patrick's campaign website has already linked to the Globe story.

Not of its hometown Congressman, of course, but of its new Rhodes Scholar:

"Lakshmi Krishnan, Sugar Land, is a senior at Wake Forest University, where she is writing her honors thesis on vampires and blood contagion in the 19th century novel.  A Carswell Scholar, she is president of her campus Amnesty International chapter, and recently interned in the Health Action AIDS Campaign at Physicians for Human Rights.  She loves singing karaoke, swimming, and the German Gothic.  At Oxford, Lakshmi will read for the M. St. in English".

Hope she gets in her absentee ballot for Nick Lampson!

The Massachusetts College Democrats are having a convention at UMass this weekend, and gubernatorial candidates Tom Reilly and Deval Patrick both spoke to about 200 people.  I came in while Reilly was taking questions and then heard Patrick's speech and q&a.

Some context -- Mitt Romney may or may not run for re-election, and if he doesn't the front-runner would be Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.  Reilly has raised a lot of money and has some visibility as the state attorney general for at least eight years.  Patrick has some very strong activist supporters but doesn't seem to be taken too seriously yet by the media or by most pols.  Someone here said he has raised $2M with which to set up an organization, including a quite professional web site.

From the appearance today I can see where the excitement comes from.  (I was already planning to vote for him -- now I've gone so far as to get a bumper sticker and give some money even though I hate to give money that isn't going to be used against Republicans.)  He does not come off as a politician, a sharp contrast from Reilly.  He emphasizes listening, being sure to get the name of each questioner, for example.  He is very decisive in his positions and in positions he doesn't take -- he highlighted places where he differed with supportive constituencies and was willing to say that he had no position on issues when he hadn't formed one.

Reilly's rationale to primary voters is that he can appeal to independents by convincing them that he is a responsible fiscal manager.  Patrick stated his rationale at the end of his speech (paraphrase): "If you vote tactics, and money, and traditional politics, I will not win and Mitt Romney or Kerry Healey will probably win.  If you vote your aspirations, I will win and we will win."

The case that Patrick is a better contender in the general than Reilly is an interesting one.  On the traditional spectrum, Patrick is further left -- pro-government, pro-gay marriage, more pro-choice, identified with civil rights law -- and hence might appeal less to the centrists and independents who form the decisive voting bloc.  But if he can get himself noticed, the contrast in style between him and Reilly could really help him -- Reilly is a long-time office-holder with an Irish name and fits into the "traditional politician" stereotype even though he is a career prosecutor who has never been in the legislature.  Patrick has never run for anything before -- he's been a corporate lawyer and a federal government lawyer (in charge of the church-burning investigation for the Clinton DoJ, if I understood him correctly).

You have to wonder whether a black man can win in what is a very white and in some ways rather racist state.  But like Obama, he doesn't strike the white viewer as "threateningly black", rather  as someone who has obviously succeeded in the establishment on his own merits.

More on the speech and q&a after the jump:

The good news from yesterday makes it all the more important
that Democrats contest as many as possible of the 231 GOP-held
House seats.  If you want to put some of your beer money toward
this goal, I currently see two ways to do it:

• Starting from this index page, you can find an ActBlue page to donate to the general election fund in any of the GOP-held districts.  This money will go the general election campaign of the winner of the Democratic primary.
  
• There is also an ActBlue contribution page for a PAC called "Leave No District Behind",
  dedicated to the goal of contesting every seat.  If this PAC had enough money, it could help recruit candidates and direct money to the candidates who most need initial seed money to be viable.

  According to that page, there has been $5632 contributed so far, $5000 in a single contribution and none of it recently.  The page has an August press release describing the formation of the PAC, but I don't know what's happened after that.  Bob Brigham has been busy in Ohio -- maybe if he's out there he can tell us what's going on, if anything.
  

The floor is open -- what else should we do?  Any particular low-profile races that MyDD should "adopt"?

Since my own district, MA-01, is one of the safest blue
seats in the country, I'm going to concentrate my 2006
efforts on a neighboring swing district, NH-02.

The incumbent Republican is Charlie Bass, who has been in
for a while and has pretentions to be a moderate (but as we
know, there are no GOP moderates).  The district is slightly
more blue than NH-01 and went narrowly for Kerry in 2004.

Paul Hodes is a former prosecutor, a musician, and a veteran.
He won the nomination in 2004 and lost to Bass by 20 points.
He got little national support despite the potential blueness
of the district, and also had some health problems late in the
campaign.  He is organizing for 2006, so far using a version of his 2004 website.  He made a few appearances over the summer, trying to pick up some money to retire his 2004 campaign debt, but the website shows little other recent activity.

One of the more promising recent developments in his campaign is that he made the top ten in the recent DFA online popularity contest (ok, he placed ninth, but there's some support out there).  His platform stresses energy independence and Bass' ties to the national GOP, both of which are stronger selling points given recent events.  I think the issues pages on his site show him to be a thoughtful Democrat with potential broad appeal.

This race should be at least on the fringes of the national
radar screen, which is why I call it to your attention.  It's not
one of the 20 most promising challenges to red seats, but it's
probably in the top 50.  It needs to be contested hard, because
if it is we will win it in the case of an anti-Bush tidal
wave, and we have some chance at it in other scenarios.

Anybody else out there interested in this race?