Sticker Campaign Seen As Long Shot

Cambridge political lore is rich with stories about former Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, and one of the favorites describes the elderly woman who didn't vote on election day. When O'Neill asked her why, she told him, "People like to be asked, dear."

Legislative aides and local politicians have been passing on that advice to Rep. Saundra Graham (D-Cambridge) since last Thursday night. That was when she lost her primary race to relative unknown Alvin P. Thompson by 49 votes.

Graham blamed low turnouts, her own low-key campaigning, and newspaper coverage of drug charges against two of her sons.

Graham announced she would run a "sticker campaign" against Thompson in the November general election, when he--for lack of a Republican opponent--will be the only one on the ballot for the 28th Middlesex District House seat. Graham plans to ask supporters to put stickers bearing her name and address on the write-in blanks inside their computer ballots' paper envelopes.

Aides to two state senators who recently ran sticker campaigns said Graham will have to appeal to unusually dedicated voters to win. Not only must voters decide which name to pick, but they must remember the name, bring stickers with them into the voting booths, and put the stickers in the right place on their ballots.

Frank Borges, chief of staff to Sen. Salvatore Albano (D-Somerville), who beat incumbent Vincent J. Piro with a sticker campaign in 1984, thinks Graham has a chance of victory if she works hard.

"I think it's possible, yes, but I think it's going to take a campaign that doesn't think it's going to win if it prints up 100,000 stickers," he said.

Danny Johnson, chief of staff to Sen. Royal Bolling, Sr. (D-Boston), who lost a sticker campaign Thursday, said, "Never say never." But he added that, like Bolling, Graham has "not enough time" to publicize her campaign.

Both agreed that Graham must recruit many volunteers to talk voters into the extra effort of using the stickers.

"You're going to really have to love a person to go out and do that," Johnson said of the district's voters.

As for the candidate's pitch, Borges said, "You have to say, `I know my name's not on the ballot, but I want you to put it there.' And most people will say, `What? Are you crazy?'"

At best, said Johnson, the tactic is uncertain. "You sit around biting your nails," he said.

Graham, who nearly lost her City Council re-election campaign last November, is up against more than voters' ignorance, said Borges.

"She has to give them a reason to vote for her," as well as an argument against Thompson, he said. Thompson, a school department truant officer who formerly served as assistant to the city manager for community relations, campaigned against Graham's attendance record and the fact that she held two public offices at once.

Asked this weekend whether the near-loss last November made her nervous, Graham noted that most liberal voters favored Councillor David E. Sullivan because they thought he was the most threatened of the incumbents they supported. In addition, she said, "I do have a bloc of solid support that follows me, no matter what."

Meanwhile, Thompson said Graham's plans were her business, but added that none of the presidential nominees ran on stickers against Michael Dukakis, nor would Dukakis wage a sticker campaign against George Bush if he lost in November.

Johnson said the sticker effort for Bolling--who ran such a campaign because he failed to turn in his nomination papers on time--faced several problems: different parts of the district used several different kinds of ballots with different procedures for write-in voting; some voting machines had write-in slots too high for handicapped or elderly voters to reach; and, as in Graham's district, the turnout set record lows at around 15 percent.

Borges said Albano's 1984 campaign risked $25,000 in borrowed money and two months of work for a sticker campaign. Albano opted for a sticker effort in the general election, because he had placed second in a three-way primary--only 163 votes behind the leader, Piro--and because Piro was about to face trial on corruption charges.

The risky undertaking worked--thanks to 75 to 100 nightly volunteers and saturation tactics using the stickers. Albano won by about 2000 votes, not counting around 1000 ballots that the Piro campaign challenged because the stickers were in the wrong place.

Borges said the campaign printed four times as many stickers as probable voters, then delivered them in four ways--once by mail, once in leaflets, once via volunteer on every district doorstep, and once outside the polling places on election day.

"There are some success stories," said Borges, who now advises other candidates on sticker campaigns. But, he added, they are few and far between.

Graham's district includes Adams, Dunster, Leverett and Mather Houses, the freshman Union dorms and Peabody Terrace.