Romney hosts gala for recruits

By Raphael Lewis, Globe Staff - May 26, 2004

Governor Mitt Romney took the stage at a highly choreographed campaign event yesterday to raise the curtain -- literally -- on a field of 106 new Republican candidates running for seats in the state Legislature this fall, the biggest crop of GOP candidates in more than a decade.

The Park Plaza event, replete with a thumping pop music soundtrack, a velvet curtain, strobe lights, and confetti bombs, marked the glitzy beginning to a campaign season in which Romney hopes to shatter the Democrats' veto-proof majority in the House and Senate.

Romney, who personally recruited some of the candidates who stood behind him on stage yesterday, depicted the elections as a battle between fresh-faced reformers and entrenched Democrats concerned with "the special and selfish interests that come in and lobby them."

"For way too long, Massachusetts has been a state with only one party in the Legislature, with only one voice, unaccountable, unacceptable to the people of Massachusetts," Romney said.

All told, 131 Republicans will vie for 121 seats in the House and Senate this year, including 19 incumbent House Republicans and six incumbent GOP senators.

The strong Republican candidate recruitment was especially notable because less than 15 percent of the state's voters are registered with the party. By comparison, Democrats make up better than 40 percent. The Democrats will put up 186 candidates in the fall elections, according to Philip W. Johnston, the party's chairman.

Despite the large number of Republican candidates -- the largest crop since 1992 -- Johnston believes only about nine races are truly competitive, five in the House and perhaps four in the Senate.

"I understand anything can happen [but] I think it's going to be a good Democratic year," Johnston, a former state legislator, said. "And I think people are very angry about [President] George Bush's administration, the mess he's gotten the country into both internationally and domestically. I don't think people are terribly happy with Mitt Romney. It's not as if he's the most popular person in town."

The new crop of Republican candidates breaks down as follows:

In the 160-member House, Republicans will send 101 candidates to vie for 94 seats in the fall elections, 82 of them nonincumbents. Of those nonincumbents, only one has held a seat in the Legislature before -- former state Senator Edward P. Kirby, who lost his seat in 1992 -- and another 11 have run for a seat in recent years.

In the 40-member Senate, 30 Republicans are angling for 27 seats, 24 of them nonincumbents. Of those, none has held a legislative seat before, and only two have been candidates in the past, said Dominick Ianno, executive director of the state Republican Party.

While the party has not compiled specific demographic data yet, Ianno said, it appeared that only 25 of the 106 Republican candidates are women, two are Hispanic, and one is Asian American.

Greer Tan Swiston, the daughter of Chinese immigrants now running against Democratic incumbent Kay Khan, said that Romney's clarion call for new, energized candidates made her feel as though she could stand up to a Massachusetts political culture dominated by white males.

"It's so difficult to break in," Swiston said. "The machine that is there is so against anybody new coming into the field. It makes it very difficult for anyone who wants to run. Like Governor Romney said, we need to have a two-party state so there isn't intimidation against people who want to step up."

Johnston told reporters before the Romney campaign event yesterday that he believes the governor has gone out of his way to target women incumbents, calling such a strategy "unfortunate." He said the Democratic Party was particularly attuned to protecting those representatives and senators to maintain gains made by women politicians in recent years.

Johnston said he hopes to raise about $1 million to aid the Democrats by Election Day in November. On Monday night, he said, a Democratic fund-raiser, also at the Park Plaza, netted $150,000. Romney has been aggressively raising money to support the Republican challengers -- at a pace of roughly $300,000 a month.

"He wants to have a war with the Legislature, and if that's the case, in [Senator] John Kerry's words, bring it on," Johnston said.

John Prindiville, a 25-year-old Republican candidate hoping to oust longtime Representative Paul Casey, a Democrat from Winchester, said he joined the "war" because he considers his age and lack of deep roots on Beacon Hill an asset in the upcoming election.

Voters, he said, are seeking fresh faces in the State House.

"We have more volunteers than we could ever ask for, and we've already started our door-to-door campaign," said Prindiville. "People look at me and they know I'm not the Beacon Hill establishment."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.