MANCHESTER, N.H. — Deval Patrick was eyeing the mug of bacon, the signature menu item at the Red Arrow Diner, a greasy spoon across the street from his presidential campaign’s new state headquarters.
As Mr. Patrick placed his order Saturday afternoon, another customer, Roger LaVault, recognized him as the former two-term governor of nearby Massachusetts.
“I like the guy,” said Mr. LaVault, a Manchester resident who works for a gene therapy company, calling Mr. Patrick “personable” and “honest.”
Then came the bad news for the candidate’s White House aspirations: Mr. LaVault said he did not know Mr. Patrick was in the race.
Mr. Patrick needs to make up for lost time. With his unusually late entry into the presidential field in mid-November — months after his opponents’ campaigns were well underway — he trails in the polls, lags in both organization and fund-raising, and has been left out of debates.
Almost two months into his unlikely run, Mr. Patrick’s campaign has failed to make big headlines, draw attention-grabbing endorsements, or dominate a news cycle with standout policy proposals. Compared with his better-established rivals in a packed field, he is drawing thin crowds.
Perhaps the biggest embarrassment for Mr. Patrick, one of the two remaining black candidates in the campaign, came in late November, when a planned event at Morehouse College, the historically black institution in Atlanta, was canceled because only two people attended.
A journalist, though, showed up to capture a photo of the empty room.
While the other candidates are sweating through a marathon, Mr. Patrick is hoping to stage a last-minute sprint primarily by focusing on a two-state campaign strategy — banking on hopes that the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina will serve as springboards to propel his candidacy.
It is an untested plan, but the theory is that a better-than-expected showing in those two states, where he has relatively high name recognition, could give his campaign the jump start it needs, providing the credibility necessary to raise more funds and remain viable as the nomination battle continues.
Skeptics question whether the idea can work.
“I think the biggest problem is that the primaries are about momentum — who is on a roll,” said Dan Payne, a veteran campaign consultant in Massachusetts. “Skipping Iowa means that he just can’t get that roll going.”
“He says he’s late but he doesn’t think it’s too late,” Mr. Payne added. “I would beg to differ. I think it’s awfully late.”
To naysayers like Mr. Payne — and there are many — Mr. Patrick, 63, points out that he was an improbable victor once before, when he first ran for governor in 2006.
“I had 1 percent name recognition when I started out and it was my first time running for anything, and no real acceptance from the political establishment at home,” he told voters at a campaign stop on Sunday in Holderness, N.H.
With the inauguration of his New Hampshire headquarters on Saturday, the hiring of additional staff members, and his campaign’s first round of television and digital advertising beginning this week in four states, including Iowa, Mr. Patrick says that the “hard work — the business of earning it” has begun.
Either he or his wife, Diane Patrick, a lawyer, will be in New Hampshire or South Carolina constantly from now until the primaries, he said.
Mr. Patrick has longstanding ties in South Carolina, and Abe Rakov, his campaign manager, said that many voters remembered Mr. Patrick’s appearances at churches and town halls across the state in 2008 to support the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, then a senator.
Johnnie Cordero, the chairman of the state Democratic Party’s black caucus, said there was still a path for Mr. Patrick, noting that some black voters there also recalled his election as the nation’s second black governor and admired him.
But Mr. Cordero, whose group sponsored an event for Mr. Patrick in November, expressed concern that the campaign in South Carolina had been slow to get started.
“I anticipated more movements from his campaign, people on the ground, grass-roots level, to invigorate and inspire,” he said. Mr. Cordero added that Mr. Patrick had events in the state this week.
As Mr. Patrick made his way around New Hampshire on Saturday and Sunday, he repeated his inspiring life story — his rise from poverty on Chicago’s South Side to success in politics, law and business — but said he worried that the American dream he lived was increasingly out of reach.
“I sound corny but I think it’s still defining, the ability to imagine a place for yourself and your family that’s beyond the ZIP code of your birth and reach for that,” said Mr. Patrick, who did not own a book of his own until he was 14.
“I totally get that a lot of that is about grit and responsibility and determination, but some of it is also about a great education and food and housing and a place in the economy,” he added.
Mr. Patrick, who has staked out relatively moderate positions, had a long weekend “to do” list that included a canvass through Manchester’s Ward 5, a densely populated trove of Democratic voters. On that walk, and at other campaign stops, Mr. Patrick found reason for optimism.
“All the people who came to the door were undecided,” he said. “It confirms what I have supposed — that they were totally open.” Because of Manchester’s proximity to Boston and its media market, voters there also generally remember Mr. Patrick’s stewardship of Massachusetts.
“He got a lot of props,” said Patricia Schoch, 61, the executive director of an assisted living facility. She greeted Mr. Patrick enthusiastically when he arrived on her doorstep Saturday, promising to consider him on Feb. 11, the day of the New Hampshire primary.
At a meet-and-greet event for Mr. Patrick at a private home in Concord, one voter said she had been swayed by Mr. Patrick’s message after leaning toward former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“After listening, I think he has more substance to his answers,” said the voter, Sally Hatch, 71, a Concord political activist working on a grass-roots effort to oust President Trump. “I think Deval Patrick has a deep script and I think he’s looking to people like me.”
Despite those hopeful signs, Mr. Patrick found reminders through the weekend that his rivals had a big head start. When he arrived at one of the 33 houses whose doors he knocked on Saturday, he was confronted by a sign for Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.
At another home, he ran into a canvasser for Mr. Biden, who was departing just as Mr. Patrick arrived.
And at other campaign events, Mr. Patrick drew small crowds. Some of the attendees admitted that they were already committed to other candidates, putting long odds on his chances.
“We never know who is going to succeed in capturing the imagination,” said Skip Berrien, a New Hampshire state representative, who was among about 40 people who came to hear Mr. Patrick speak at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter Saturday evening.
Mr. Berrien gave Mr. Patrick “little chance.”
“He came in late, and also his fund-raising is probably difficult, and his poll numbers are minuscule,” said Mr. Berrien, who lives in Exeter and said he had endorsed Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
The most recent poll in New Hampshire, which surveyed 519 registered Democrats and was released Sunday, found that only 5 percent of respondents were even considering Mr. Patrick. Only 1 percent said they would vote for him if the election were held today. Another 1 percent said he would be their second choice.
“Deval has been so great on so many sustainability issues,” said Gary Hirshberg, a founder of Stonyfield, the New Hampshire-based yogurt company. “I believe he would be an extraordinary president and he’s my first choice for V.P.”
Mr. Hirshberg’s first choice for president, though, is Mr. Buttigieg, he said, even as he was attending a small event for Mr. Patrick on Sunday in Holderness. (He had informed Mr. Patrick of his support for Mr. Buttigieg beforehand.)
More than a year ago, Mr. Patrick had been making big plans for a White House run.
“We had a date to announce, a launch plan, all of that,” he said in an interview at his state headquarters.
Then, life intervened. Diane, his wife of 35 years, learned she had uterine cancer around Thanksgiving in 2018, several weeks before he had planned to announce his candidacy.
“It was very sobering and that brings you back to earth,” Mr. Patrick said. “When we got that news so close to the launch date, the only responsible thing was for us was to stop, pay attention to that, pay attention to her.”
Mr. Patrick said he felt “very blessed” when his wife was declared cancer-free.
But, later, as he was working in his office at Bain Capital, the private equity company where until recently he ran an investment fund devoted to businesses that have positive “social impact,” he saw a Democratic field developing that included a half-dozen of his friends.
“I was talking to them and their campaigns and increasingly feeling like we were, as a field of Democrats, at risk of missing the moment,” he said.
Mr. Patrick compared this “moment” in history to the 1860s, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society.
He wanted to be a part of it.
“I’ve been an underdog all my life,” Mr. Patrick said in his new ad. “And I’ve never let that stop me.”
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Deval Patrick Hopes for an Unlikely Surge, but for Many, ‘It’s Awfully Late’ - The New York Times
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