BRAINTREE — Six hours into a shift gathering signatures to help Michael J. Sullivan qualify for the Republican ballot for US Senate, Robert Greenwood’s voice had faded from a ballpark-vendor boom to a parched rasp. But still he walked semicircles in front of a Sullivan banner, appealing to passersby. The clock was ticking.
“Signatures to put Mike Sullivan on the ballot,” Greenwood repeated, five to 10 times a minute, hundreds of times an hour, while trying to draw eye contact with shoppers at the South Shore Plaza.
Comments
This is where the failure of Bay State Republicans to organize ward and town committees across the Commonwealth has come back to bite them hard, in the back. Without these basic party organizations at the local level, especially in most of western Mass., they just don't have the field troops to deploy to gather nomination signatures the way the Democrats do. After each election cycle, the sitting Republican state party chair pledges that they will "invest in rebuilding the grassroots, blah, blah, blah" and then they never do. And come Feb. 28 they will pay a heavy price in the form of lost ballot access.