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Groundwork, political good will pay off for Romney

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney held a triumphant event at Southern NewHampshire University after his expected win in the NewHampshire primary.Dina Rudick/Globe Staff/Globe Staff

CONCORD, N.H. - Mitt Romney made a crucial decision after his disastrous defeat in the 2008 New Hampshire Republican primary. He would court John H. Sununu, the former governor who had become chairman of the state Republican Party and now needed help.

In the following two years, Romney provided that help, raising money for Republican candidates across the state, including sheriffs, councilors, state House and Senate candidates, and congressional aspirants. With Romney’s assistance, Sununu and the Republican Party scored huge gains, regaining control of both the state House and Senate, laying a foundation of support that paid off in Romney’s victory last night in the Republican presidential primary.

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“Romney was the man behind the curtain, financially,’’ said Pat Griffin, a New Hampshire Republican consultant who briefly worked with Romney’s 2008 campaign.

Campaign aides estimated that Romney and his political action committees poured more than $100,000 into a variety of local campaigns and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

So after Romney announced his 2012 presidential candidacy, Sununu returned the favor. He announced in October that he would back Romney, joining many other Republican leaders. That was followed by the implementation of a well-financed, high-tech campaign machine that no competitor yesterday could match.

Tellingly, it was overseen not by a New Hampshirite, as was the case four years ago, but by Jason McBride, one of Romney’s most trusted allies. McBride had run Romney’s successful Michigan primary campaign in 2008 and then held a top job at the Republican National Committee in Washington. At Romney’s request, he moved to New Hampshire, bringing a sophisticated knowledge of campaign management to what had been a local operation.

The Romney campaign relied on a massive database on every potential voter, identified and categorized right down to the type of magazine to which a voter subscribed. When the database showed fewer backers than expected in a particular town, a Romney bus tour was routed through the area to drum up support.

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The campaign strategy came from the ashes of the demoralizing 2008 experience, in which some key New Hampshire advisers felt they were often ignored by what they considered to be an egotistical Boston-centric operation. Decisions in that campaign had to go through multiple layers of Boston staff, which sometimes rejected requests for Romney to campaign here more frequently and spend money more freely. New Hampshire campaign officials had complained repeatedly to Boston that Romney failed to focus on his strength of an economic message and instead was drawn into long debates about his weakness, foreign policy.

It was in the aftermath of that campaign that Romney reached out to Sununu. The often-cantankerous former New Hampshire governor had seen this movie before. He had worked so ruthlessly and efficiently in guiding George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign here that Bush named him White House chief of staff. He had stayed neutral during Romney’s 2008 bid, but reentered political life after President Obama won the general election.

With Sununu running the state Republican Party starting in 2009, and while Romney was helping to finance candidates, displeasure with Democrats and President Obama was on the rise, and the 2010 midterm elections became a huge GOP success. The 400-member state House went from a Democratic majority of 225 to a Republican majority of 294, and the 24-member state Senate went from a Democratic majority of 14 to a Republican majority of 19, according to GOP officials. The two US House seats switched from Democrat to Republican, and the open US Senate seat stayed in Republican hands as a result of the victory by Kelly Ayotte, who has become one of Romney’s most visible supporters.

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Many of those newly elected Republicans felt indebted to Sununu and Romney and have worked hard for his campaign.

“With virtually every serious candidate, he helped us win,’’ Sununu said. “The people he supported were grateful for his help.’’

Tom Rath, a longtime Republican consultant in New Hampshire who is advising Romney, said campaign officials often personally delivered Romney’s check to the lowest-level politicians, saying something like, “You know who this is from.’’ Republican politics in this small state are so personal and interconnected that “everybody gets the joke. Everybody understands it. You hope that down the road there is a bigger relationship. And the people we have reached out to and who reached out to us are very, very loyal, and they have multiplied.’’

One example is D.J. Bettencourt, a state representative from Salem, who said he was able to become House majority leader in 2010 thanks to Romney’s financial help to many Republicans and the state party. “I firmly believe that, and I am not just saying that because he is the candidate I support for president,’’ Bettencourt said. “I see a very strong fingerprint of Governor Romney on our success in 2010.’’

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With a political network in place, Romney took an early lead in state polls and created an aura of inevitability. That may have helped scare off competitors. Romney faced a relatively weak, underfunded field. Some of his toughest potential opponents, such as Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, decided not to run. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty dropped out early and endorsed Romney.

Most of those who did run couldn’t afford to run television ads in New Hampshire attacking him, and some were struggling to introduce themselves to voters with just days left in the primary race.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who lost to Romney by eight votes in Iowa, didn’t have the time or money to win over New Hampshirites or launch ads against Romney. Ron Paul had a ceiling of support and spent much of his time and money going after Romney’s rivals, which benefited Romney. Jon Huntsman ran a solid old-fashioned retail campaign but couldn’t catch up. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich struggled to recover from the attack on his record by a super PAC that supported Romney, and his full-throated attack on Romney’s business record came just days before the vote.

“It is just a really weak field, and the people who were not supporting Romney could not agree on who the non-Romney was,’’ said Dartmouth College government professor Linda Fowler. “He always said, ‘I’ll be the last man standing.’ ’’

Fowler said that because Romney had run for president four years earlier, there was a sense that he was a known quantity and thus “he had the luxury of not being . . . subjected to the withering scrutiny that others campaigns got’’ until the final days.

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Romney’s “ground game,’’ a catchall term that refers to organizing support and turning out voters, was much improved from 2008. The campaign utilized a computer program called “war room’’ that enabled staffers and volunteers to share information and be in sync across the state. Instead of setting up offices across New Hampshire, the campaign opened only one, a sprawling, crowded office in Manchester, and used technology that let home-based volunteers to tap into campaign databases when calling voters.

The campaign, which suffered from being top-heavy in 2008, reduced its paid staff here from 16 to nine, while relying more on the network of supporters that Sununu and Romney helped bring to power in 2010. Campaign officials said the payoff was palpable. A tally kept at headquarters showed that 3,000 volunteers had made 520,000 phone calls, knocked on 65,000 doors, and distributed 25,000 yard signs.

Romney, meanwhile, followed a game plan that relied on absolute message control, providing only limited access to the press. Some emerging political figures in the state were brushed off as the campaign made the tactical decision that the power of the much ballyhooed Tea Party was overestimated. Jerry DeLemus, head of the Granite State Patriots Party, the leading Tea Party organization, said “We tried very hard to get him to meet with us and talk to us. He shunned the Tea Party. We couldn’t get a meeting with him.’’ DeLemus wound up personally endorsing Santorum.

At the same time, the campaign focused on winning over key opponents from 2008. The campaign was launched at the home of the state campaign chairman of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and closed with an endorsement from Senator John McCain, who beat Romney last time in New Hampshire.

In the end, the campaign believed that the shift from the 2008 emphasis on foreign policy to this year’s focus on the economy would make the difference.

“We are in a much different place,’’ said Jim Merrill, who managed the campaign in 2008 and is a senior adviser this time. “The governor’s background dovetails nicely with the issues now.’’


Michael Kranish can be reached at kranish@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKranish