JOHN WALSH MADE his most visible mark by charting a winning course for a previously unknown first-time candidate to be elected Massachusetts governor and helping a four-decade congressional veteran fend off a challenge from a member of the state’s most storied political family. But his more enduring impact was felt outside the headlines, where he reshaped how campaigns were waged and brought countless young people into the political fold with an encouraging message about their own ability and their potential to make a difference.
“There are multiple generations of political staffers and activists and candidates and elected officials who experienced John Walsh believing in them before they believed in themselves,” said Alex Goldstein, who got hired by Walsh for his first job at age 22 when he joined Deval Patrick’s campaign for governor in 2006. “John never sent anybody to voicemail. No matter where you were in the power structure, he would take that call.”
To the ego-driven world of politics, Walsh brought an unusual mix of well-honed savvy and disarming humility.
Jesse Mermell, who first met him when she was the 20-year-old head of Young Democrats of Massachusetts, saw that over and over in the meetings he welcomed with young people looking to get involved in politics. “Even though he was older and more seasoned and better networked and smarter, he always acted like the person he was talking to was his equal – and it is an understatement to say that is not always true in politics,” said Mermell, who went on to serve as the governor’s communications director under Patrick.
Walsh, who died on Monday at 65, started out in town politics in Abington, where he was raised in a working-class home by Irish immigrant parents, and he never strayed from believing in the power of grass-roots organizing at the local level.
When framing it in more highfalutin political parlance, Walsh referred to it as “relational organizing.” In simpler terms, he said in an interview three years ago, it means “talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors.”
He harnessed that approach to help Deval Patrick rocket past established political figures in 2006 to win the governor’s office, deploying a winning combination of old-fashioned shoe leather tactics and high-tech voter tracking tools that Barack Obama would successfully draw from two years later.
Goldstein, who calls Walsh “the godfather of the grass-roots,” said he believed in that kind of outreach “not just as a tactical approach or strategy but as a statement of values – that the way we win elections is by meeting people where they are and talking to them face to face and hearing what matters in their lives.”
Following Patrick’s victory, Walsh was elected chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. It was a role that would seem to mark him as the ultimate political insider, but that was not a label that fit him well.
“He was a huge believer in the underdog,” said Stacey Monahan, who served as the party’s executive director under Walsh.
Walsh bristled at the top-down ways that Democratic leaders enforce order in the Legislature, welcomed the idea of primary challengers, and was particularly eager to see more women and people of color in office.
He provided encouragement to Andrea Campbell, now the state’s attorney general, in her first race when she took on – and beat – a three-decade incumbent Boston city councilor. And he stepped out well ahead of most prominent politicos in endorsing Ayanna Pressley’s 2018 primary challenge to 20-year incumbent Michael Capuano.
“When so many insiders feel threatened by an outsider and upstart, I feel like he always was so open to seeing possibility in a new voice,” said Mermell.
And sometimes in an old voice.
In what may have been the crowning achievement of Walsh’s ability to get voters to rally around an underdog, he managed to effectively play the insurgent card for 74-year-old Ed Markey, a four-decade creature of Capitol Hill, when he fought off a 2020 primary challenge for his US Senate seat from then-Congressman Joe Kennedy, who was nearly half his age.
As Markey’s campaign manager, Walsh helped ignite a “Markeyverse” of young activists, who turned the internet into a virtual canvassing operation in a race that played out at the height of the pandemic. The campaign leveraged Markey’s co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal and other policy positions to rally progressive voters to his side.
Walsh also had the campaign reach back to Markey’s first run for Congress, in 1976, to help turn on its head what could have been a race framed as an effort to unseat a tired fixture of the Washington establishment. In a remarkable bit of repositioning jujitsu, they made Markey the outsider, using a TV ad from his 1976 race to revive the decades-old story of his desk getting moved to the State House hallway when he went up against Democratic leadership as a young state rep.
“He’s the original disruptor who’s willing to put it all on the line,” Walsh said of Markey during the campaign.
He could well have been talking about himself.