STEVENSVILLE - It's two days after the election, and E.J. Pipkin is standing in the back of his trademark red F-150 pickup, waving at motorists, just as he's done practically nonstop for the past 15 months.
Only this time, the burly Dundalk native, the son of a retired union electrician for Bethlehem Steel, is thanking voters for an overwhelming election-night victory over Democratic Sen. Walter M. Baker, 75, the chairman of the General Assembly's powerful Judicial Proceedings Committee.
Baker was felled by a forceful anti-incumbent Republican surge that will sweep Pipkin and three GOP delegates from the 36th District to Annapolis come January.
A millionaire bond trader who cashed in his Wall Street fortune about four years ago and moved into a $1.9 million, 18-acre Kent Island estate with his wife and their three young children, Pipkin shelled out more than $250,000 of his own money on his first try at elective office.
His unprecedented spending for the seat - it likely will top $500,000 by the time final campaign reports are filed - raised a few eyebrows. But Pipkin, 46, is not apologizing for upping the financial ante to win a seat representing the largest Senate district in Maryland, one that sprawls from Kent Island in Queen Anne's County to Cecil and Caroline and Kent counties.
Even some supporters, such as Earl L. Chambers Jr., a retired Annapolis dentist who managed Pipkin's campaign, acknowledge feeling a little uncomfortable about the race, in which Baker reported raising $165,000 in his most recent campaign finance report three weeks ago, a total that is sure to rise when all contributions have been tallied.
"I'm not keen on what it cost, but that's the way the game is played," says Chambers, who has lived on Kent Island since 1969. "E.J. started from a modest background in Dundalk, and he's earned everything. The man is an absolute bulldozer."
Chambers and others who know the affable, former football and lacrosse player say the focus and work ethic that drove him in the New York financial district - the same hard-nosed attitude he brought to a successful battle against state plans for dumping dredge spoil at a site near the Bay Bridge - made the difference for the first-time campaigner who claims to have knocked on 10,000 doors.
"We're not used to this kind of money," says Democratic Queen Anne's prosecutor David W. Gregory, a 20-year veteran who lost his bid for re-election. "But whenever I saw Pipkin out on the campaign trail, which was often, he was in constant motion."
Pipkin insists that relentless personal contact with voters - waving at intersections, attending hundreds of fire-hall dinners and breakfasts from Stevensville to Galena, shaking hands at fairs and volunteer carnivals from Denton to Elkton - gave him an edge against an entrenched incumbent.
"It sounds trite, I've said it so many times, but without all that hard work, people would not have accepted just pouring money into a campaign," says Pipkin. "You can't buy an election on the Shore. You've got to look people in the eye."
Pipkin vows to maintain that contact by opening district offices in every county in his far-flung district. He says environmental issues are key to his rural constituency, especially to farmers who are struggling to meet state requirements for nutrient management on their fields.
Friends such as Wayne A. Beall aren't surprised by his priorities. They credit Pipkin as the key figure in the successful two-year struggle by Citizens Against Open Bay Dumping, a group formed in 1999 to scuttle state plans for dumping dredge spoil from shipping channels near the Bay Bridge.
"He cut his teeth on that fight," says Beall. "I think the idea to run came straight out of his frustration with people in state government and the way citizens were treated."
Pipkin considers that the fight against dumping spurred his interest in politics, but Patrick T. Welsh, a former state delegate and senator from Dundalk, recalls his 1974 campaign for the Senate and a young volunteer named Pipkin. When the 18- year-old was asked about his future, he told Welch he wanted a job on Wall Street and after that, maybe to enter politics.
"He is truly the most focused person I've ever known," says Welch, 52, who worked with Pipkin on the bay dumping issue.
Pipkin, a member of Dundalk High School's class of '74, played one championship season with the Salisbury State College lacrosse team before transferring to Roanoke College and finishing his undergraduate work there. Later, he earned his master's from what he calls the "boot camp of business schools," the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.
Pipkin, who was raised a Democrat, said he switched affiliations after hobnobbing with party luminaries in New York during the Democratic National Convention in 1992, an experience that made him feel that the party had left him.
"Growing up where I did, when I did, pretty much everybody was a Democrat," he says. "Dundalk is a conservative, working-class community. Now it's all pretty much Bob Ehrlich territory."
With Ehrlich set to become the state's first Republican governor in more than 30 years, Pipkin is hopeful that he can make an impact in the Democrat-controlled Senate. At the least, he promises to proceed with the zeal that has marked his tenure in his adopted home base.
"If I were stranded on a desert island, I'd probably make it a full-time job," says Pipkin. "That's just the nature of me."