Following Reich’s concession, the campaign e-mailed 14,000 supporters, encouraging them to get behind O’Brien.

But Harvard students who worked for Reich during the primary say O’Brien’s efforts to recruit them to her campaign met with limited success.

Peter P. Buttigieg ’04, who headed the Reich subcommittee for the Harvard College Democrats, says interest in the gubernatorial race faded after the emotional letdown of the primary season.

“It doesn’t seem that the spirit is quite the same,” Buttigieg says. “A lot of the enthusiasm that we had during the primary campaign didn’t last after the primary.”

He says many former Reich supporters have shifted focus to the key U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire, where the Harvard College Democrats have been making regular weekend trips since late September to support Gov. Jeanne Shaheen in her race against U.S. Rep. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.).

Eliot J. Rushovich ’03, who spent part of last summer driving the “Reich Reform Express,” the campaign’s bus, will be among those riding a yellow school bus up to New Hampshire this weekend.

Rushovich is writing his senior thesis on party politics in Massachusetts, but though he supports O’Brien he says that after committing so much to the primary he could not bring himself to work on her general election campaign.

“When you work on a campaign for months, the campaign and candidate becomes a part of you,” he says. “It’s psychologically difficult to spend several months talking about why one candidate is so great and then go out on the front lines a day later and switch.”

Rushovich says in the aftermath of the primary he became more involved with the College Democrats and helped the party in New Hampshire.

Front Lines of the Face-Off

While former Reich supporters have not flocked to the O’Brien standard, Harvard is still well represented among her supporters.

“I think we’ve actually been pretty successful with the Harvard campus,” says Travis L. Small, an official for the O’Brien campaign.

But he acknowledges Reich’s pull with students.

“I think Reich definitely connected with students in a way that a candidate hadn’t done in a while,” he says. “I think we’ve had a little bit of a leaner, meaner machine.”

On the other side of the ballot, members of the Harvard Republican Club are joining Mitt Romney’s effort to continue the party’s 12-year lock on the Corner Office.