The conventional wisdom is already fixed: if Christy Mihos — the convenience-store magnate and Big-Dig whistle blower who has pledged to run for governor — campaigns as an independent, he’ll be doing the Massachusetts Democratic Party a huge favor. Mihos would pull voters from Republican lieutenant governor Kerry Healey, or so the thinking goes. And this, in turn, would give the Democratic nominee — Tom Reilly? Deval Patrick? Chris Gabrieli? — a cakewalk into the corner office.

You’ll hear this argument both from liberals, who make it with a kind of nervous glee, and from the smattering of Massachusetts conservatives not linked to the Healey campaign. If Mihos challenges Healey in the GOP primary, says Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation, “We’ll wish them both well, and be supportive of whichever one of them wins.” And if he makes an independent bid? “Then I think I’m going to simply have to slice my wrists,” she answers. “You’d be splitting the vote just to elect the Democrat. And that’s something I don’t even want to think about.”

Relax, Barbara. An independent Mihos candidacy could be just as dangerous to the Democrats as to Healey. For that to happen, though, Mihos has to break with his Republican past and embrace a new political identity — and right now, it’s uncertain whether he’s prepared to take that step.

Straight talk
Mihos’s regular-guy persona is a big source of his appeal. Most candidates protect themselves with smooth-talking press flacks; when they do speak, it’s in cautious, carefully crafted sound bites. Mihos takes a different tack — which is how, late last week, this reporter found himself in Mihos’s palatial West Yarmouth home, ogling the Kennedy compound across Lewis Bay and parsing the upcoming campaign with Mihos and his comely wife, Andrea. (There is, of course, an obvious tension between being an Average Joe and living in a $6.5 million mansion on the Atlantic. Mihos sublimates it with blue-collar verbal tics, repeated references to his Brockton roots, and an eager, seemingly guileless mien; whether this can hold up over the course of a high-stakes political campaign remains to be seen.)

Reporters love unfettered access to their subjects — and since the media warm to candidates who treat them well, and pass this enthusiasm on to the public, this approach should help Mihos sell himself as a kind of straight-talking anti-politician between now and Election Day. But there’s an element of risk here as well. When a candidate drifts into dangerous territory, a skillful minder can pull him or her back to safer ground. Working without a net ratchets up Mihos’s authenticity quotient. But it also gives him free rein to stumble.

And stumble he did, as he discussed his prospective independent candidacy last week. When the Phoenix asked Mihos to comment on the aforementioned theory — i.e., that by running as an independent, he’d only be helping the Democrats — the candidate had two good answers at his disposal. The first was pragmatic: since unenrolled voters, a/k/a independents, comprise more than half the Massachusetts electorate, an independent candidate would immediately represent the state’s biggest voting bloc. The second was idealistic: voters are sick of the status quo, tired of partisan bickering, and desperate for leaders who’ll spend their time getting things done rather than scoring political points.

Mihos chose neither. Instead, he essentially said that his only reason for running as an independent would be his inability to get a fair shake in the Republican primary. Here’s the exchange in question:

Mihos: I’ve been a Republican in the Commonwealth longer than Mitt Romney and Kerry Healey combined.... I don’t have to prove my stripes to anybody. We’re doing everything we possibly can to earn our way onto the Republican ballot by getting 15 percent in the convention.... I’ve always been a Republican. But what is troubling, to me, is that [Healey] controls the party, the party apparatus, the credentials committee. Her husband’s business partner [Darrell Crate, who works with Sean Healey at Beverly-based Affiliated Managers Group] is the head of our party. The sitting Republican governor has already come out and endorsed her. All the state senators and all the state reps have basically stood with her....

Phoenix: Your Republican allegiance is obvious. But are you also intrigued by the idea of going the independent route? If you do, would it reflect more than just your conviction that you can’t get a fair shake in the Republican Party?

Mihos: It would be that, in the final analysis, we would have determined — after doing all our due diligence, after looking at all our options — that we could not get a fair shot at the ballot by going through the convention process as a Republican. That’s all it would reflect.