page_title: Mitt Romney
section_title: 2002 gubernatorial campaign
hierarchical_section_title: Mitt Romney / Governor of Massachusetts / 2002 gubernatorial campaign
caption_attribution_description: English: Mitt Romney-Kerry Healey 2002
context_page_description: Willard Mitt Romney is an American politician, businessman and former presidential candidate who has served as the junior United States senator from Utah since January 2019. He previously served as the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and was the Republican Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election.
  Raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by his parents, George and Lenore Romney, he spent over two years from 1966 in France as a Mormon missionary. He married Ann Davies in 1969; they have five sons. By 1971, he had participated in the political campaigns of both parents. Romney earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brigham Young University in 1971 and a joint JD–MBA from Harvard University in 1975. Romney became a management consultant and in 1977 joined Bain & Company in Boston. As Bain's chief executive officer, he later helped lead the company out of a financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded and led the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became one of the largest of its kind in the nation.
context_section_description: In 2002, plagued by political missteps and personal scandals, the administration of Republican Acting Governor of Massachusetts Jane Swift appeared vulnerable, and many Republicans viewed her as unable to win a general election. Prominent party figures – as well as the White House – wanted Romney to run for governor and the opportunity appealed to him for reasons including its national visibility. A poll by the Boston Herald showed Republicans favoring Romney over Swift by more than 50 percentage points. On March 19, 2002, Swift announced she would not seek her party's nomination, and hours later Romney declared his candidacy, for which he would face no opposition in the primary. In June 2002, the Massachusetts Democratic Party challenged Romney's eligibility to run for governor, noting that state law required seven years' consecutive residence and that Romney had filed his state tax returns as a Utah resident in 1999 and 2000. In response, the bipartisan Massachusetts State Ballot Law Commission unanimously ruled that he had maintained sufficient financial and personal ties to Massachusetts and was, therefore, an eligible candidate.
  Romney again ran as a political outsider. He played down his party affiliation, saying he was "not a partisan Republican" but rather a "moderate" with "progressive" views. He stated that he would observe a moratorium on changes to the state's laws on abortion, but reiterated that he would "preserve and protect a woman's right to choose" and that his position was "unequivocal". He touted his private sector experience as qualifying him for addressing the state's fiscal problems and stressed his ability to obtain federal funds for the state, offering his Olympics record as evidence. He proposed to reorganize the state government while eliminating waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The campaign innovatively utilized microtargeting techniques, identifying like-minded groups of voters and reaching them with narrowly tailored messaging.
  In an attempt to overcome the image that had damaged him in the 1994 Senate race – that of a wealthy corporate buyout specialist out of touch with the needs of regular people – the campaign staged a series of "work days", in which Romney performed blue-collar jobs such as herding cows and baling hay, unloading a fishing boat, and hauling garbage. Television ads highlighting the effort, as well as one portraying his family in gushing terms and showing him shirtless, received a poor public response and were a factor in his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, leading in the polls as late as mid-October. He responded with ads that accused O'Brien of being a failed watchdog for state pension fund losses in the stock market and that associated her husband, a former lobbyist, with the Enron scandal. These were effective in capturing independent voters. O'Brien said that Romney's budget plans were unrealistic; the two also differed on capital punishment and bilingual education, with Romney supporting the former and opposing the latter.
  During the election, Romney contributed more than $6 million – a state record at the time – to the nearly $10 million raised for his campaign overall. On November 5, 2002, he won the governorship, earning 50 percent of the vote to O'Brien's 45 percent.
caption: Romney's gubernatorial campaign logo from 2002
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