Grassroots Success: "You can't buy that kind of loyalty"
Nashua Telegraph/Concord Monitor, 11/10/06
Shea-Porter had a simple, thrifty plan
When Carol Shea-Porter decided to run for Congress a year ago, she called state Democratic Party Chairwoman Kathy Sullivan for advice.
“Right at the start, I told her, ‘You’ve got to raise money,’ ” Sullivan recalled yesterday. “ ‘You’ve got to have a million bucks to win a seat in Congress.’ Silly me.”
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Tuesday’s victory was Shea-Porter’s first attempt at elected office. She worked on Gen. Wesley Clark’s presidential primary campaign in 2004, and much of her congressional campaign staff was made up of people she met then, including Mayer. Disappointed, but not deflated after Clark lost that primary, Mayer and Shea-Porter vowed to stay involved in politics. They kept in touch with dozens of activists they met on the campaign trail – and set their sights on Bradley, spending much of 2005 following him to town meetings and hounding him with tough questions about the Iraq war, the deficit and health care.
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While Shaheen used his connections to establish ties between Shea-Porter’s supporters and the rest of the Democratic Party, the campaign still prided itself on its plucky, grassroots origins. Instead of slick fliers, volunteers penned personalized postcards to likely voters. The campaign went without printed letterhead or return envelopes for most of the race.
“A great deal of Carol’s success is from the intensity of her people,” said Dudley Dudley, a former Democratic congressional candidate from Durham who worked on the campaign. “To say they’d walk through fire – that’s an understatement. A whole team of unpaid volunteers – you can’t buy that kind of loyalty.”
