By Kenneth J. Cooper

Boston—Already, Deval Patrick is making history by being the first African American to seek reelection as a governor, in Massachusetts. His chances of setting another milestone as the first to win a second term as a state’s chief executive in November look pretty good.

“I think he has a good shot, absolutely a good shot,” says Ravi Perry, a political science professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “Whether you like him or not, he’s a likeable guy, and in politics that counts for a lot.”

However, it’s also true that in today’s down economy, many Massachusetts voters are not liking Governor Patrick. His popularity has dipped below 50 percent, a dangerous warning sign for any incumbent. Critics have turned against him the slogan of his first campaign, “Together We Can.” A bumper sticker reads: “Together We Can Defeat Deval.”

Patrick owes his modest lead of six or seven points in the polls to a split in the opposition between the Republican candidate, Charlie Baker, and Tim Cahill, an independent who was elected state treasurer as a Democrat. The Green Party is running perennial candidate Jill Stein.

Baker, who has a bigger campaign chest than Patrick, is his closest challenger. But the blueblood health care executive and former state official is not the kind of populist who can tap into the anti-establishment mood that propelled Scott Brown into the US Senate in January. Cahill, who does have working-class roots, trails far behind.

The only other African American ever elected governor, L. Douglas Wilder in Virginia, could not run for reelection because he was limited to a single term. Governor David Paterson in New York ascended to the office when a vacancy occurred, as did Pinckney B.S. Pinchback during Reconstruction in Louisiana.

Perry says “nothing but the economy” explains why the Massachusetts race is as competitive as it is for Patrick, whose rousing election in 2006 inspired euphoria in the state and foreshadowed Barack Obama’s victory two years later. Many political commentators see Patrick’s current campaign a test case for President Obama’s coming bid for a second term. Both ran as outsiders and change agents who downplayed their race.

Patrick has suffered from the reformer’s syndrome. Some major accomplishments have improved the processes of governance by tightening state pension rules, consolidating transportation agencies and strengthening ethics laws. But, with the state’s revenues shrinking, he has not been able to deliver enough of the direct benefits that financially-struggling voters expect from their government during an economic slump.

The sense of disappointment extends to African Americans and Latinos. So far, the excitement that his first campaign generated in Boston’s black community is nowhere evident this time.

“They have these extremely high expectations. They want extreme, immediate material benefits that they can see, feel and touch,” says Perry. Bluntly, he adds: “They can keep looking, and it’s not going to happen. The money isn’t there, and what they’re asking for costs money.”

Patrick claims to have made the state’s largest investment in affordable housing, a $1.3 billion bond issue he signed in 2008. Housing takes time to build, and the new units get spread around the state. African Americans make up 7 percent of the state’s population and Latinos about 9 percent.

His major initiative for creating jobs, authorizing casino gambling in the state for the first time, has been stymied by fellow Democrats in the Legislature. They also defied him on which taxes to increase when the state government got backed into a financial corner. Normally, tax policy is a major decision on which legislators of the same party can be expected to follow a governor’s lead.

In early August, Patrick scored a significant legislative victory long sought by black activists when he signed legislation reducing the number of years that the criminal records of jobseekers are open to employers. The new law also prohibits asking about arrests on initial job applications. Backers say the changes will make it easier for ex-offenders to find work and avoid future trouble with the law.

A former NAACP-LDF lawyer, assistant attorney general for civil rights and corporate attorney, Patrick is serving in his first elected office and has taken a while to learn how to work the levers of power in the State House. His first chief of staff, Joan Wallace Benjamin, was a former nonprofit executive who did not last long. He has since beefed up his staff with seasoned state operatives, including Arthur Bernard who, after Benjamin, is his second black chief of staff.

Lately, Patrick has displayed a stronger hand with the Legislature. After making the tactical error of being the first to offer a compromise on the casino gambling bill this summer, he vetoed it when the Legislature went beyond his offer—which he promptly withdrew. Casino gambling is not that popular anyway with the white liberals who are Patrick’s political base.

Like Obama, Patrick built his successful campaign on appeals to white voters, rather than following the classic strategy of building on a racial or ethnic bloc. Gwen Ifill, in her book on Obama and other new black politicians who have won in majority white electorates, describes the strategy as campaigning from the outside and then into black communities.

Some African Americans still see the black governor as an outsider. He lives in the same mostly white suburb of Milton, where he arrived in 1970 from Chicago as an Afro’d teen to go to prep school. He went from Milton Academy to Harvard University and Harvard Law School.

He has populated his administration with a large number of black appointees in important positions, but most are not well-known or visible in Boston’s black community. In February, they went on air on a black-owned radio station, serially, to “introduce” themselves to listeners—three years after Patrick took office.

The only other African American ever elected statewide in Massachusetts, former US Senator Edward Brooke, benefitted from having lived in Roxbury, the heart of Boston’s black community, before moving to suburban Newton. His close ties to the community helped attract enthusiastic black support, despite being, as a Republican, in a minority of the state’s black residents when he was elected state attorney general in the early 1960s and then to the Senate in 1966.

On Nov. 2, Perry expects the masses of black voters to vote again for Patrick but also expects them to be less vocal about their support than they were four years ago. He predicts Patrick will do well in Boston and other cities, but receive less support in rural areas, and the western and northern sections of the state. That leaves the Boston suburbs as major battlegrounds.

Patrick does not have to look far for a model in his historic bid to become the first black governor reelected. In 1972, Brooke became the first and so far only African American to win a second term in the US Senate. He did it in Massachusetts.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a freelancer based in Boston. He also edits the Trotter Review at the University of Massachusetts Boston.