Excerpts from Deval Patrick’s speech explaining the character of his supporters:

You have been dismissed by the competition and trivialized by the press. But take none of that to heart. I know who you are.

You are Democrats and Independents and Republicans.

You are liberals and moderates and pragmatists and true conservatives, the ones who believe that good things should be preserved.

Some of you are activists and some of you – like Dar Hiekkenen who kicked us off this afternoon — have joined a campaign or participated in a caucus for the very first time.

You are laborers and professionals, teachers and small business owners, journalists and health professionals. Some of you are retired. Some of you are looking for work and are discouraged.

You speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, Chinese, Vietnamese, Patois, Thai.

You come from every city, town and hamlet in every corner of this state.

You are Paul and Joanne Hush, retired on Cape Cod, who are renting out their home this summer and moving up to Charlestown so they can volunteer full time on this campaign.

You are Tom McGrath from Pepperell, who fell and broke a vertebrae a few days before the caucuses but asked his doctor to postpone his surgery so that he could show up and participate.

You are David Place from Milton and Eleanor Bleakie from Scituate, staunch and active Republicans who changed your party allegiance for the first time in your long political lives to support this cause.

You are Greg Lippolis and Greg Lipshutz, my old freshman college roommate, from Newton who are participating for the first time in politics because they see a chance to keep government out of their private decision to marry.

You are John O’Connor from Plymouth and Steve Falvey from Saugus, both union carpenters who took me around job sites— without press and without fanfare — to help me understand what it means in everyday people’s lives when the law is not enforced.

You are Sonny and Sandy Gauss from Plymouth, who remember nearly 12 years ago when we sat together in their Brockton living room and solved a problem they had with a predatory lender, or Jacqueline Jean-Pierre from Cambridge, who remembers more than 25 years ago when I defended her and her family in the against an unscrupulous landlord in the Somerville District Court

Each and every one of you thinks for him- or herself. You are as tired as I am of being crammed into an ideological box. And none of you is buying a hundred percent, frankly, of what either party is selling.

That’s who we are. You see for yourself how broken our state is and how fractured our communities are.

You feel for yourself the widespread anxiety about our future.

You see for yourself the yawning lack of leadership on Beacon Hill.

And you are as hungry as I am for candor and leadership.

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