ALBANY – On a drizzly day a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001, Thomas Suozzi stunned the Democratic establishment in Nassau by winning the county executive primary against a candidate who was better known, who had a near-monopoly of endorsements from elected officials like Senator Schumer as well as unions, and whose base of support was in the Democratic stronghold of North Hempstead.

Mr. Suozzi, after serving a full term at the helm of Nassau, is once again the underdog, this time against a candidate with statewide and even national name recognition, whose campaign is better organized and funded, and who has seemingly the entire Democratic Party elite behind him, New York’s attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

With a little less than 200 days to go before the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Mr. Suozzi, 43, is following much of the same playbook that he used to defeat Thomas DiNapoli, a state assemblyman from Great Neck. Not only is the campaign recycling the slogan – “I can do it, because I’ve done it” – but it’s also relying on a key strategy from before, which is to dramatically increase voter turnout.

“There’s no doubt that in order to win we have to appeal to a broader base than just the typical primary voter in New York,” said Mr. Suozzi’s campaign chairman, Jay Jacobs, who ran Mr. Suozzi’s county executive campaign. “We’re going beyond the traditional base Democratic primary voter.”

In 2001, concentrating tour stops in parts of Nassau whose residents tended to skip Democratic primaries, Mr. Suozzi, then a four-term mayor of the tiny North Shore city of Glen Cove, won by a margin of about eight percentage points, with about 68,000 people coming to the polls. That figure is twice the number of Nassau Democrats who voted in the 1994 primary, the last time there was a competitive race among Democrats for county executive. Political observers say at least part of the increase had to do with the patriotic effect of September 11.

This time around, Mr. Suozzi’s campaign is targeting so-called “dormant Democrats” across the state, in places with moderate Democratic voters, such as Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton and Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, and Rockland counties, along with neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Mr. Suozzi’s public appearances after announcing his candidacy six days ago were in Staten Island, Howard Beach in Queens, and the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.

Mr. Suozzi needs voters from these areas to counter the core Democratic Party activists who swell the polls on primary day, particularly in Manhattan, where Mr. Spitzer and his lieutenant governor running-mate, David Paterson, live.

The campaign isn’t making predictions on turnout. But in recent elections, turnout has dipped to as low as 690,000 – the number of Democrats who voted in the 1994 attorney general’s race in which Mr. Spitzer lost – and as high as almost 1.3 million in 1982, when Mario Cuomo pulled off an upset against Ed Koch.

To increase turnout, the plan is to essentially run a general-election style campaign before the primary, presenting to New Yorkers a candidate who is a church-attending Catholic with an Italian father, an Irish mother, and a Polish wife. Mr. Suozzi’s campaign themes are fiscal responsibility, reducing Medicaid waste, and “reforming” Albany – issues that generally appeal to centrist voters. The strategy even extends to Mr. Suozzi’s position on abortion; he’s pro-choice but thinks government should spend money trying to reduce abortions.

The campaign, Mr. Jacobs said, is trying to appeal to a “voter that is far less strident on some of the value-driven issues, more moderate – certainly fiscally more moderate. It’s a voter that has been turned off by what seems to be the required pull of special interests of the party to the left. It’s not a voter that is not identifiable as a Democrat.”

But will these voters vote for him if they have never heard of him?

“Big deal, nobody knows Tom Suozzi,” Mr. Jacobs said. “That’s nothing that $20 million can’t solve.”