Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Massachusetts Senate candidate Stephen Pagliuca’s biggest calling card is 10 feet by 15 feet and hangs over the parquet where the National Basketball Association’s Boston Celtics play. It reads: “World Champions 2008.”

Pagliuca, a managing director at Boston-based Bain Capital LLC, co-owns the team that earned its league-best 17th title last year. He’s using the Celtics’ popularity to seek the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat vacated by Edward Kennedy’s death in August.

“I would say his chances depend on Kevin Garnett’s health and I say that only semi-facetiously,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional historian with the American Enterprise Institute, referring to the Celtics’ all-star center.

The 54-year-old candidate, even with the Celtics connection, was unfamiliar to many voters when he announced his campaign two months ago. Seventy-two percent of respondents to a September poll by Boston-based Suffolk University had never heard of him. The poll, which surveyed 500 registered Massachusetts voters Sept. 12-15, had margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

After spending eight weeks and almost $2 million of his own money campaigning, Pagliuca has pulled into second place in the four-way Democratic race, according to an Oct. 26 poll of 468 registered voters by Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts, conducted Oct. 18-22. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

‘Gaining Every Day’

“My message is resonating out there and we’re gaining every day,” Pagliuca said in an interview. “The issue is, how do we build businesses with good-paying jobs for the working class and middle class of Massachusetts?”

Still, Pagliuca’s path to victory remains “difficult,” said David Paleologos, who heads the Political Research Center at Boston-based Suffolk University. “He’s got to find a place in the Democratic spectrum.”

The 9.3 unemployment rate in Massachusetts compares with a 10.2 percent national rate for October. Employment in the state probably won’t start improving until mid-2010, said Gus Faucher, the Massachusetts analyst for Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Pagliuca was named the 35th richest Bostonian this year by Boston magazine, which estimated his wealth at $410 million. He was hired to work at Bain in 1982 by Chief Executive Officer Mitt Romney, 62, who later became Massachusetts’s Republican governor. Pagliuca is currently on leave from the private-equity and venture-capital firm.

Romney Senate Race

His resume and wealth recall Romney’s political profile when he entered a 1994 Senate race against Kennedy. Kennedy was in the closest re-election of his career until weeks before the vote when a series of television ads portraying Romney as a company raider who killed jobs secured the incumbent Democrat’s victory. Romney, who served as governor from 2003 to 2007 and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, declined to comment, said Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman.

Pagliuca’s Romney-like resume is a potential liability in the wake of the financial crisis, Ornstein said.

“If he were identified very closely with the barons of big finance who helped to send us right into the toilet, that would not be a comfortable position,” he said.

Pagliuca said “the truth” about the private-equity industry “didn’t get out” when Romney ran for Kennedy’s seat, and his campaign wouldn’t repeat that mistake.

Job Creation

“The truth is, in Massachusetts, there were 650,000 jobs created last year by venture capital,” Pagliuca said, citing a study by IHS Global Insight.

His Dec. 8 Democratic primary rivals are Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who scored 37 percent in the Western New England College poll; Pagliuca had 14 percent; U.S. Representative Michael Capuano, who had 13 percent; and Alan Khazei, founder of Boston’s youth service program, City Year, who garnered 4 percent support. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The winner will face the Republican candidate, state Senator Scott Brown, in the Jan. 19 special election to choose someone to serve out Kennedy’s term through 2012. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick chose Paul Kirk, a friend of Kennedy, to fill the seat until the election.

The son of a salesman and a teacher, Pagliuca spent his early years in Framingham, Massachusetts, and attended high school in New Jersey. At Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, he played basketball and was “the worst player on the worst freshman team in the last 50 years of Duke,” Pagliuca said.

Harvard Business School

He worked his way through college and Harvard Business School by driving moving vans and cutting lawns, Pagliuca said. When he left Harvard, he and his wife, Judy, whom he met there, were $30,000 in debt.

The couple, who have four children, live in Weston, a Boston suburb that has a median household income of $153,918, the highest in Massachusetts.

Pagliuca’s classmates in the Harvard Business School class of 1982 included JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chairman Jamie Dimon, General Electric Co. Chairman Jeffrey Immelt and Vornado Realty Trust President Michael D. Fascitelli. His contributors list last month showed Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., gave the maximum $2,400.

Pagliuca said he resigned from corporate boards including Burger King Holdings Inc., HCA Inc. and Gartner Inc., to avoid conflict.

Republican Donations

When Romney ran in 1994, and for several years afterward, Pagliuca was registered as a Republican, and he has donated to Romney, former President George W. Bush and the Massachusetts Republican Party, according to data compiled by the Washington- based Center for Responsive Politics. His wife, Judy, 53, a former executive at Fidelity Investments, was treasurer of Romney’s Senate run. Romney appointed her to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board in 2006.

Pagliuca defended his party affiliation and donations, saying both were done out of loyalty to friends and allies. He has helped more Democrats than Republicans, he said. Of the $102,050 he has donated since 1991, $87,050 went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Pagliuca said he’s in favor of abortion rights and gun control and supports President Barack Obama’s efforts to overhaul health care.

“I’ve always had progressive Democratic ideals,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Moroney in Boston at tmorrone@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 9, 2009 00:01 EST